


BY THE WANT OF IT

by noahfronsenburg



Series: TO CONQUER OR DIE [1]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BDSM, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Disabled Character, Historical Accuracy, Hurt/Comfort, Impact Play, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Insomnia, Loyalty, M/M, Non-Penetrative Sex, Open Relationships, Painplay, Past Relationship(s), Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Praise Kink, Service Top, Spanking, Subspace Or Dissociation? Enough Trauma And You Too Can Have Two For The Price Of One, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Male Character, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-01-11 08:34:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: “You picked me.” And then I said it, the words which had haunted me since that day in New York. “To kill King George II.”—————In the Affairs of this World Men are saved, not by Faith, but by the Want of it.





	1. EPIGRAPH

INTERLUDE:

IN THE AFFAIRS OF THIS WORLD MEN ARE SAVED, NOT BY FAITH,  
 **BUT BY THE WANT OF IT.**

( _POOR RICHARD’S ALMANAC, 1754_ )

 

———————

 

Cowards die many times before their deaths;  
The valiant never taste of death but once.  
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.  
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;  
Seeing that death, a necessary end,  
Will come when it will come.

 

\- William Shakespeare’s _Julius Caesar_ ,  
Act II, Scene ii

 

———————


	2. ACT IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The King of England didn’t know it yet, but he was a dead man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ london; october 1760 ]

ACT IV:  
_these many, then, shall die; their names are prick’d._

 

I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and stared straight ahead. My palms were sweating within my gloves, the new, unbroken doeskin leather not breathing enough given my nervousness, and my new shoes, buckles and all, pinched uncomfortably. The high top of my collar, stiffened by my stock, was irritating underneath my left ear, and I had to resist the urge to fidget with it. The scent of the powder and pomade in my hair made my nose itch, my eyes water.

I was, altogether, uncomfortable.

Evidently my discomfort was enough to distract Jenny, for she looped her arm through mine and set her hand against the top of my wrist. “Relax,” she said, her voice a low whisper, and I did my best to heed her, taking another deep breath as I dropped my weight back to my heels and resolutely did _not_ smooth the front of my breeches. “You are as agitated as a cat facing down a basin of water.”

“Aye,” I replied to her, not looking away from Haytham’s back where he stood before us, calmly checking his pocket watch, his cane fashionably tucked up under his arm. Every time he moved, I could see his shoulderblades shift beneath the thick velvet of his coat, and I watched them as he breathed, trying to center myself and pace my breaths to his. “I feel as out of my depth, that’s for certain.”

“Adapt and overcome,” Jenny told me, patting my hand once again. She and her brother were most alike in their attitudes of speech, direct and unrelenting: Kenways had very little patience for theatrics. Which was ironic, given how damn dramatic they were at the best of times. Jenny gave my elbow one last squeeze and moved past me to join her brother as he put his watch away and offered her his arm.

The door before us opened into the ballroom, and I kept my eyes on Haytham’s back, not letting the opulence of Kensington Palace blind me as I knew it would. “Sir Haytham Edward Kenway, Lady Jennifer Scott, and Captain Shay Cormac!” The chamberlain cried it out into the crush, and I tried not to focus on the two dozen people who turned to face us as Haytham and Jenny led the way into the party beyond, letting me skulk along in their shadows.

The doors shut, waiting to let in the next group, and the noise of the party descended around us like a sharp bucket of bathwater that had been dumped over our heads. Make me balance on a gunwale in a blizzard any day of the week in comparison to this: at least there I knew where I stood, between the devil and the deep blue sea. Here, everyone, every _thing_ , could have been a disaster in the making. I was as out of place as a turtle crawling back out of the soup, a street brat from an Irish Catholic New York family who was barely lettered before his fifteenth birthday, my mastery of the sword far greater than that with the quill. I’d learned how to dance in Jenny’s sitting room while the tailor had measured me for the very tailcoat I now wore. I’d learned the same how to bow, as Haytham had quizzed me again and again as how to address Peers, hardly looking up from his correspondence as he dropped hypotheticals on me.

I didn’t even _own_ a watch.

But here I was anyway, and it was some poor source of relief to see that nobody glanced but half a moment at me; their attention was taken up completely by the siblings—Jenny was a spinster of nearly fifty, whose accent was scented strange from her time in the Ottoman Empire, beautiful and finer educated than many of her male contemporaries, who spoke no less than four languages, owned and ran her own household. She was even dressed differently from most of the women in the room: she wore no silks and taffeta, no muslin or brocade. She was in simple wool and velvet in deference to the weather, her gown remarkably plain in contrast with the fashion about her. To my eyes, in the house at Queen Anne’s Square, she had looked radiant and rich as a King. Now, I could see how intentionally plain she was, the rich dark green of her gown bringing out the deeper hues in her thick black hair, steeled all through with grey.

And, perhaps even more than Jenny, who was by now something of a regular fixture to such parties, people stared at Haytham. He had told me he hadn’t returned to London in five years, and even then, his tenure had been remarkably brief. His last society functions had been even earlier: to most of London society, he was a fascinating enigma, a Colonial entrepreneur and mysterious soldier worthy of gossip. Much like his sister, his choice of color palette was restricted: in slate grey piped with cream, he was almost colorless in comparison to our fellows.

He certainly cut a swathe.

We moved through the crowd, slowed by well-wishers and greetings, the lot of them directed entirely at the siblings. People overlooked me, as Haytham had well suspected that they would: I was too young, too green, too out of place. People saw me as a gentleman’s gentleman, when they saw me at all. Which was for the best.

When we had cleared most of the crowd, Jenny stopped Haytham. “I must part from you,” she said to him, kissing him upon both cheeks. “Do try to not keep Captain Cormac all evening. I have a dear hope for a worse partner to join me at the dance so I shall not look the fool for once.”

Haytham smiled, bowed and kissed her proffered hand. “I shall endeavor, sister dear.” She curtsied to me and I bowed reflexively after a moment, before Haytham beckoned to me, set his hand at the small of my back.

Even through the layers of my court dress, I could feel the heat of his palm. He didn’t let it come into full contact with my back, but I could feel his thumb and the press of two fingers, like brands against my skin. I swallowed. “I promise not to monopolize you into petty politics,” he said, as we turned away from where Jenny had gone to meet a group of other older women, most of whom were accompanied by young ladies—girls not even yet out of their teens. Daughters. “There are a few business partners I need to introduce you to while we have the opportunity set before us.”

I nodded. “Where first, Sir?”

The option was taken from us by a strong voice calling, “By God, is that Haytham Kenway?” Instinctively, we both turned, and I felt Haytham tense behind me, the curl of his fingers inward on his left hand, his right still resting atop his cane, even as I did the same, lifting my hands before I relaxed.

It was relieving to know that Haytham was on edge as much as I was. He tried not to be _quite_ so quick on the draw, although he did regularly fail.

“Lord Bute!” Haytham relaxed beside me, withdrawing his arm from round my waist to bow to the man who joined us now, and I copied him. “Good Lord, Sir, I had not expected to see you in attendance. I thought you were still absent from the Court.”

“I was in the city for some small business and His Majesty cannot very well bar me from official functions, as long as I do not introduce myself and grate upon his tender nerves.” Bute flashed a smile. He looked to be about Jenny’s age, although it was hard to tell under all the paint upon his face and with a wig on his head.

If I was the poorest wretch at this party, Haytham and Jenny were on the low end. This man was so lofty above even them that his radiance should have shone thrice as bright as theirs. But his opulence—gold and silver, brocade and embroidery, shot silk and furs—only made Haytham in wool and velvet with his silk-faced waistcoat the only obvious signal to his status look all the brighter for it.

Aye, but I was biased, after all.

“And what of you?” Lord Bute returned, settling in to speak with Haytham, his eyes not yet straying to me past his first initial glance. “When did you return to London? Are you staying?”

“Only very briefly,” Haytham shook his head. “Pray forgive me, Bute, I would have written to you before I arrived if I had known. As it is, we arrived little more than a week ago and have been busy from dawn until sunset since. Like as not, we should be sailing by the end of the month.”

“So soon? We had hoped you might stay at least a month. Surely business in the Colonies can wait some time longer; there must be someone who can manage it in your absence. I had hoped to introduce you to—well, you know.” I wasn’t sure what he meant, but Haytham seemed to, and he looked momentarily startled.

“No, certainly not. It is for the best you remain in charge there. It is for the good of us all if he remains in the dark to my existence, I should think. Things in the Colonies being what they are, and His Majesty’s health being what it is, the less confusion of ties between us can be but for the benefit of all.”

I would have to force Haytham to explain whatever was going on later, if neither of them chose to divulge details now.

“But I have been remiss,” Haytham continued, reaching behind me once again to tug me forward, left his hand proprietarily on the small of my back, as if marking out his territory. I was enough taller than he was that it felt a bit silly. “Allow me to introduce my companion. Bute, this is Master Shay Cormac of New York; Shay, this is The Right Honorable Earl of Bute.” I bowed a second time, and found him watching me with bright eyes.

“I heard his name called as _Captain_ ,” the Earl said, glancing once more to Haytham and cocking one brow. “Is he the lad you wrote of?”

“Indeed. You will find _Master_ is a more recent acquisition, but not fit for such a party as this.” Ah. Templar; so that at least made something clear. “Shay, Lord Bute is my counterpart, here in London.” Grand Master, then—and it was only belatedly that the implication of his earlier words reached me. This was the dear friend that Jenny had written of; his best companion was the man whom I was to elevate to his new exalted station. I flashed a smile to Haytham, grateful for his veiled explanation, even if it did make my knees feel a bit weak with the renewed reminder of what I undertake presently.

“It’s an honor to meet you, My Lord.” I bowed again. “I am your servant, Sir.”

“Haytham has kept us abreast of your actions in the Americas these last few years, and all among us have found your escapades...enlightening. You have my congratulations, Master Cormac, your accolades are certainly earned. You are one of very few among our number to have had such an illustrious career on both sides of the aisle. Indeed; I believe Haytham is your only equal.”

“Ah, you flatter me overmuch, Sir.” Haytham glanced at me as he spoke. “Indeed, I was never Master of both and can claim no such confidence. You should see Master Cormac in the field. He makes me look like an unbalanced milkmaid.”

“I do not,” my voice came out strangled. “You’re brilliant with a sword.” Better than me, certainly. In close combat I was never as fluid or graceful as Haytham was. I was better with my hidden blades, but that was just practice, and a far finer shot, but—

“Yes, but climbing a tree?” Haytham asked, his brows both raised. “You’ve seen my best attempt.” I had, actually. It had ended in him flat on his arse in a pile of leaves and cursing until he was blue in the face. “No, better to accept defeat magnanimously. Shay is the best replacement I could wish for in the field.”

“You took it, then?”

“Indeed. I’ve had no opportunity as yet to exercise it, since Master Cormac and I have been at sea near a year now, but as soon as I return to the Colonies it is my intention to enter into it with all that I may muster.” The promotion Haytham had finally agreed to, then, that’s what this was about, no mean courtesy call—a member of the Inner Sanctum.

In my own opinion, he was probably the only member among them who was trustworthy.

“I’ve no doubt you shall prove yourself our dear Reginald’s equal; you always were the best of him.” I could neither see nor feel any shift or change in Haytham, but I did not need any so plain a sign to know his true mind; those words would cut to the quick. “Perhaps together we can fill his shoes.”

Haytham laughed, and to my own ears it sounded strained. “You shall puff me up, Bute. I remain unsure that anyone may ever be able to do that.”

“Pleasantries aside, I have some small business matters to discuss with you, if you’ve the time,” Bute replied, then glanced back towards me, “But I should wish to take the measure of this Master first. What do you think of your new station, Master Cormac?”

I straightened under his gaze, unwilling to prove myself less than worthy of Haytham’s esteem. “I shall do my best in it, Sir. I know earning your trust is hard, given who and what I am, but I intend to see anything Master Kenway may ask of me through.”

Haytham still had his hand on the small of my back. Nug.

“I’ll accept Master Kenway’s praises, since he’ll insist upon it, but I’m a Captain, my Lord, and if ploughing the waters will do the business good, then I will do my duty unto death.”

“Have you previously been to London?”

“Once, Sir, as a child. Never came farther than the docks. It’s a beautiful city,” I told him, and it was—aye, if filthy. “But makes me long for home. New York may not be so much to look at, but she’s got it where it counts.”

“I have never been to the Colonies, so I shall have to take your word for it. Was the crossing a difficult one?” I hid a grin—why was it the landlubbers who always asked complex questions of sailors? I doubted he could have made heads nor tails of my naval dispatches. Haytham himself struggled with them upon the occasion, and that was with me _and_ Christopher often translating for him.

“No undue surprises. The _Morrígan’_ s not truly a seagoing vessel, but she managed well enough. I can’t say I’m looking forward to going back in the midst of winter, but the weather is at least more predictable this far south. We’ve sailed more treacherous waters in worse weather.”

“Up and down the coast, was it not?”

“Aye, Sir, all the way past Newfoundland.”

Lord Bute opened his mouth to ask something else, when Jenny stepped over, a thundercloud beneath a perfectly placid surface. He turned toward her and immediately bowed deeply, and she returned it with a curtsy so polite and stiff it could have been used for stays. “Lady Jennifer; you are looking radiant tonight, as always. How is your health, Ma’am?”

“Well, as ever, I thank you.” Jenny offered her hand and let the Earl kiss it; I noticed she did so with a look of distaste she hid behind her upraised fan. Neither sibling, it seemed, was over-fond of the Northern Department’s Grand Master. “Brother, I am sure you and His Lordship have business to discuss for once in person rather than via letters, and I would hate to see you bore your guest. Captain Cormac, may I suffer you to join me to dance?”

Haytham stepped away from me, folded his hands behind his back, and I missed the heat of him at my side immediately. “Please. It’s hardly a proper coming out ball if he doesn’t enjoy the best of society.” I looked toward him before I followed Jenny. “Whenever you’re done, Shay, Bute and I shall likely be toward the Northern wall. I’m sure you can find us without difficulty.” I nodded, and he turned back to the Earl. As Jenny led me away, I overheard them continuing, going in the opposite direction from us, “Bute, I need John—is there any way you can find the excuse to send him back to New York?”

“I loathe that man,” Jenny said, her voice low between her grit teeth as he walked away. “I’d peck out his eyes in the street if I could.” I tried in vain to hide my smile at her heated words.

“He did smell a bit,” I admitted, keeping pace with her as we crossed the room. “Are all peers that slimy in person?”

“Worse, usually.” Jenny had wrinkled her nose in an expression that was so alike to Haytham I felt my chest tighten. “The women are a sight better than most, but the men disgust me in general as a species. Here.” She stopped, at the edge of the open space for dancing. “Now, let’s wait for the next one.” Jenny’s brief tutoring in contredance had left me with about enough knowledge to not start a brawl, but I still jittered with apprehension as the dancers cleared and two new lines formed, Jenny and I finding a spot near to the end. Somewhere far enough down that we would blend into the crowd, but near enough to the front that we would be able to dance a good amount. When the music started up, Jenny led more than I did, and I had no desire to take over, copying her as I spread my attention around the crowd.

We worked our way to the head of the line, and it was as we stepped into switching places, we were able to pass close enough to speak. “At the head,” Jenny said, and I followed her eyes to the peak of the room, changing my vision to my second sight without conscious thought.

In my ancestor’s eyes, King George II was rimmed in gold.

I let my vision drop as we continued our steps. Now that I had seen him, he was a faint blur at the corner of my vision, staying painfully still. He was old, I could see now, focusing on him, letting my feet carry me through the dance as Jenny and I matched further back into the line. The first number finished, the lines loosely re-forming, and we took the same position again, giving me as much time as possible to study my target.

Old, aye, and frail. He hardly moved. Jenny had said the majority of London was certain the King was blind and deaf, or close enough to, but in health otherwise fine enough to keep him living five, maybe ten, more years. He sat very still on the throne at the end of the room, watching the revels with a weather eye, but otherwise making no motion to join. In the time I watched, through the second dance, only two people came up to speak to him, so it was clear that aside from the guards and a servant nearby, he was no mean participant. He was simply there to oversee.

When the music ended, I nodded a slight aside to Jenny. She led us up to be first couple. Nobody got in our way—she had that effect on people, I was beginning to notice—as she installed us at the head of the line.

In my ears, my heart pounded, loud and raucous. I felt sick to my stomach. I could never forget jumping on Smith from the tree above his tent, and smelling the fear on him. And here I was. Again.

Full circle.

“Steady, Shay,” Jenny murmured, as we took hands. “Can you do it?”

“Aye,” I told her, staring unseeing at the wall ahead of us. He was square in my vision. The line bowed, and we bowed with them. With Jenny’s hand under my own, balancing it, I was able to look up, keeping my head straight forward as our hands remained level for formality’s sake. I sighted down the underside of my wrist, turned upright with Jenny’s below my own, her fingers wrapped loosely around mine.

I tilted my fingers backwards, lowering hers with them, and breathed a quick sigh and a prayer to St. Patrick, and fired.

In the chaos of the party, the stamp of our dancing feet in time, and the orchestra’s music, the air-lock whisper of the dart gun on my hidden blade firing was completely inaudible. My vision hadn’t proven me wrong, this time or any other: it flew true. I saw the King jump, just slightly, from the corner of my eye as Jenny and I went into the first step, reach down and fiddle with his breeches at the buckle above the stocking, pull free something that glinted faintly in the light from the lanterns.

A single sewing pin, headed with pearl. Left in by mistake. Easy to miss. Easy to misplace. Taken from his own tailor’s purse the week prior, when he’d been fitting me, and I’d slid my fingertips into his pockets and plucked it free. A pin, laced with a slow-acting poison.

The King of England didn’t know it yet, but he was a dead man.

“Shay?” Jenny asked, as the set came to an end and I stepped out of line.

“Aye,” I said, my voice shaking, my hands trembling. She took my elbow and led me free from the open dance space, once more into the crush of the rout around it. I could hear nothing over my own pounding pulse and felt faint, clammy with sweat, but had to keep my composure. If I faltered now, I could undo the whole operation, get too much attention, people would ask questions—I forced myself to take even, quick breaths and blink even as the chaos of the room whirled around me. “Jenny?” My voice hardly sounded like myself.

She and I were an island adrift in a raging gale. Jenny held my hands, let me double over her, and remained still as stone. Outside of us, crowds pushed past. The hurly-burly cared not for some strangers, clustered too close; the chaos was oppressive, the excess stifling. The room was lit bright as day with lanterns and candles and glittering chandeliers that sprayed rainbows from their glass to refract and shatter around the room in brilliance, all the flames and their flickering lending an aetherial quality, making every motion almost dreamlike in its complexity, each shadow multiplied manifold times, every face brought to life and animation in a hundred lines by the interplay along their planes. The prismatic quality of light within glitter, of sequins, of brilliants on dresses and pearls in hair and about necks, of gold and silver embroidery, the flash of semiprecious stones; the strange way it bent through crystal glasses or twisted effervescent from silverware.

The noise. Feet—boots, shoes, women’s narrow, tapered ankles heavy atop their sharp heels, walking or stamping or shifting or dancing. The rustle of clothing, some of it laden nearly to chime with metal and stone, the way it brushed and hushed and shushed and yet clustered noise louder than any yell, and above that, the _voices_. A hundred thousand conversations, carried on in whispers that pressed almost-pink at the edges of my consciousness, yelled to carry above the crowd, tangling with the light from above, crashing back to earth heavy and monstrous in its impact. People clinking drinks in toasts, brushing cups, shattering said cups when a clumsy hand slipped, clicking them to their teeth as they drank, silverware striking the china below it, added percussion to this cacophony of untuned strings, like the worst orchestra ever heard. And the orchestra, too—playing to dance, but rather than _to dance_ all I could hear was the screech of untuned strings, rendered inchoate by the susurrus that was growing to a tidal wave beneath it, threatening to drown it utterly.

Perfume. Sweat. Sex. Blood. Pomade. Powder. Food. Drink. Spirits.

I swayed, and Jenny held me tighter, kept me upright. “Shay?” I needed to sit down. I needed to get out. I needed silence and quiet and cold—I needed Haytham, Haytham— “Shay, what do you need? Shall I fetch my brother?“

“ _I need a drink.”_


	3. ACT I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was good to be home.

ACT I:  
 _hence! home, you idle creatures get you home: is this a holiday?_

 

The sea smelled different when you got nearer to land. Out on the open ocean, far beyond sight of a fair harbor, it smelled of salt and brine and the endless dark of the deep, of secrets and unborn majesty and _primordia,_ the fundament of nature. To the unprepared, to the uninitiated, the open ocean smelled of fear. I’d met many men, new sailors some and strangers only aboard for passage others, who would skirt the edges of the deck, or hide below in cabins, as if they were afraid of what lurked out of sight below, what might be waiting for them if they peered too close.

The closer you got to land the more you could smell civilization. When you were near an uninhabited island, it would be the crush of detritus that decayed upon the forest floor, or the scent of fires from travelers and tradesmen. By ports it was the creak of boats in the harbor, the burn of lighthouse fuel, the stink of rancid sweat and cheap ale.

In New York, it smelled like _humanity_ , in all its vagaries and imperfections, in all its disgust and beauty and life, and I tilted my head back into it and took a deep breath as the _Morrígan_ was tied in to dock. I wasn’t needed behind the wheel while she was being lashed down, so I just leaned over the railing and let the sounds and smells of New York assault me.

I hadn’t seen home in ten months. Ten months at sea. Ten months, dead bodies aplenty to populate the darkest of my dreams, and nothing of home. And now—finally. Finally.

Home.

“When even the Captain looks ready to kiss the dirt, it’s high time we put to port!” Gist laughed behind me from the main deck. “Think three days shore leave is going to be enough, Captain?”

“No!” I yelled back. The crew laughed. “To hell with it!” I laughed, too. “A week shore leave! She needs repairs enough, let’s all get blind drunk and make the best of New York!”

The entire boat cheered. Footsteps approached me, and I opened my eyes, recognizing Haytham’s steady tread, turned to meet him. He looked more at ease than he had the last few weeks; he had been irascible and even more acidic than usual after we had lost the trail of the Precursor Box in May, when it had vanished into the impassable wilds of northern Baffin Bay. Being ashore would do him good, too.

Haytham took to the water better than any landsman I’d ever met, perhaps upon account of his blood, but he still was clearly out of place upon a quarterdeck. His realm was upon the soil; my own upon the seas.

“Will you be returning to Fort Arsenal tonight?” Haytham asked, and I nodded.

“Aye, Sir. As soon as I’ve seen the _Morrígan_ safely to port and dealt with the officials. I’m not one for a night out tonight, Sir. A cheap ale is of little interest next to my bed.”

“It is a very good bed,” he agreed, and I tried—and failed—to hide my smile. He clucked his tongue at me. “The nerve of you sometimes. Pride ill becomes you, Captain Cormac.”

“Must be why you like me so much.”

“ _Tart_ ,” he muttered, low enough I only barely caught it, but it made me grin wider. “I shall see you anon, then. I have some small errands in town, but I will endeavor to join you and whoever else is in residence for dinner.” Haytham turned toward Gist on the main deck, raised his voice. “Christopher, may we expect your sorry corpse at dinner tonight, or only upon pain of death?”

“You’ll have to carry my body free of the tavern, sir!”

“You know,” I shouted down to him, “There’s a term for a man of your age blacking out at a tavern.” Gist turned toward me, expectant. “A public nuisance.” He doffed his hat and bowed from the waist, graceful.

“You wound me deeply, Shay! At this rate, this old man will have to teach you a lesson.”

“One involving drinking, Gist?”

“How right you are!”

It was good to be home.

 

 

My business in the harbor kept me there for most of the day. When dinner had passed and the time for supper had come, I returned to Fort Arsenal to find it empty of the rest of the upper echelons of the Colonial Rite. There was a note left on the kitchen table in Jack’s neat hand, explaining his own absence to go and bail Christopher out of potential arrest (again), but otherwise nobody was to be seen.

The Templar navy, if it could be called that, waited for me instead, and I ate a cold supper with a bottle of wine Haytham had marked out of some note to me as I pored over maps and charts and dispatches and balances until I had to light tapers. William returned first, and joined me, reclining on a couch and writing letters to various agents in the frontier. One bottle of wine became three between us by the time Jack and the remains of Christopher Gist arrived, and then it escalated to five. Eventually Thomas sauntered in, and that wrote the night off for good.

When I stopped being certain my sums were accurate, I turned in. Charles was apparently in the city, albeit not currently in residence—he had been called to some army business some three days before our arrival and was not expected back for at least another week unless something urgent needed his attention—and Haytham was nowhere to be found.

I had expected nothing less. Haytham Kenway reminded me of a cat I’d cared for once as a child, before I’d gone to sea with my father, when I had still lived with Liam’s parents. The minute there was anything worth seeing or doing, the cat would appear, no matter how mundane it may have seemed. It could be tempted, upon the occasion, for food, but most of the time it had kept itself in fighting shape through only its own exertions. It enjoyed a warm, soft bed to curl up in with someone else keeping it warm, but good luck getting the cat to stay in your bed if you put it there. I’d always had better luck leaving my bedroom shutters ajar, and it would slip in during the night and I’d awaken with it curled between my feet, paws in the air, the portrait of contentment itself.

He wanted attention, on his own terms, and when he desired it. He would come get it if he wanted it. The rest of the time, Haytham was an enigma to everyone who knew him. Tracking him was impossible—I had tried, numerous times, but he always slipped me before long—as was predicting him. Every time I thought I had him figured out, he would do something new and strange.

It was unsurprising to me he never showed up before I stripped down to my shirt and practically blacked out as soon as my head hit the pillow. He’d come by whenever he decided to, and no sooner. Trying to make him do otherwise was like trying to hurry the cycles of the moon or the tides: all I would get was a headache and short patience.

Indeed; it was true dark, stars and streetlamps the only light through my cracked window shutters when the door to my room creaked open sometime in the night, and I rolled sideways slightly, my hand reaching for the knife on the bedside table as I lifted my head enough to see who it was. “My apologies,” Haytham murmured, standing in the doorway in only his shirtsleeves and breeches. “I had hoped I would not wake you.”

“Sleep better at sea,” I mumbled, dropping my arm and face back to the mattress. Haytham shut the door behind him, carrying the taper to the table at his side of the bed, the side closer to the door since he kept more erratic hours than I did (if such a thing was truly possible) and I heard a gentle thump as he set something down onto the bed next to me.

I turned my head slightly, opened one eye again to stare at what he’d placed down. It was a pile of letters, tied up with twine—months of unread correspondence, no doubt. Haytham stripped out of his stockings and breeches, took his hair free of its queue, and went to wash his face as I closed my eyes again, returning to my doze.

I had half expected him to go to his own bed. Or at least to Charles’, even after what he had told me on deck. Since the latter was cold and empty, with Charles out of Headquarters, it made sense to join me—but I was unused to Haytham coming to my room in the night on land. “Go back to sleep, Shay,” Haytham murmured, brushing my hair back from my face as he got into bed, lifting the sheets to join me, his toes icy even despite the August heat as they brushed against my bare shins. “Don’t let me wake you, _mi alma_.”

“Wasn’t expecting you,” I mumbled, as he shifted, settled, and started to sort through the letters, if the rustle and whisper of paper was any indication. He huffed an amused chuckle, winding down to work beside me, and I dozed in the low yellow light from his candle, listening to his pencil on the letters as he made marks to turn into responses later. A low thought niggled at me—someone needed to get the man a damn aide de camp before he killed himself working, at the very least so he could put purpose to his hours with more effect—but I was too tired to voice it, half-asleep. Every once in a while he would reach one hand down, brush it over my side from my shoulder to my hip, as if reassuring himself I was there with him.

I had almost fallen back asleep when he stiffened next to me. It was no small shift, notable for an adjustment in his breathing but nothing else—no, he went absolutely still, frozen, and it was instinct that woke me totally from the edge of slumber, opening my eyes as I stared into the relative dark of my side of the room, the flame from his candle burning low, throwing wild and flickering shadows across the opposing wall. “Sir?” I asked, when he did not move or speak, my voice low and scratchy with sleep.

He had set one hand on me some time earlier, and it remained totally still, hot over the arc of my hip. Heavy like a brand.

“Shay.” Whatever vestiges of sleep I’d been hanging onto shed off me like water from an oilskin, and I rolled over, sat up partway, leaned onto my elbow as I looked at him. That wasn’t Haytham, the man who shared my bed and often my thoughts as an equal, whose lively humor and cynical disposition leveled my own idealistic bent, whose hands grounded me when my mind threatened horrors.

That was the voice of Grand Master Kenway, a tone of steel and secrets. Looking at him, his mouth a pinched line sucked back over his teeth, his eyes narrowed behind his spectacles where they were slung low on his nose, I could see only that deadly business playing out upon his face. He had shoved his pencil into his mouth as he was wont to do whenever he thought nobody was paying attention, and had already started to chew dents into the wood, and he was staring at a letter he was holding.

Abruptly, he pulled away from me, and I sat the rest of the way up as he folded the letter, set it atop the pile and got back out of bed. He did not bother with his hair, just got dressed again, stockings and breeches both, still chewing on the pencil as he gathered up his letters. Whatever it was, it had to be urgent—say what I would about how impossible it was to get Haytham to take a break or _sleep_ for a full night, once he went to bed, sleeping or not, he was loathe to get back up out of it. “Sir?” I asked, at last, watching as he tucked the pencil behind his ear. “Is something the matter?”

“How fast can the _Morrígan_ be seaworthy?” He did not look at me as he spoke, his grey eyes staring unseeing at the wall as he thought.

“Uh.” I rubbed my face, trying to wake up, yawning into the back of my hand. “Ten days at the fastest? I promised the crew a week shore leave, which slows it, but if we rushed—“

“You have seven,” Master Kenway said shortly as he glanced at me, and I felt cold down to my toes. He barely saw me, I could tell, his mind turned entirely inward. His focus, razor-sharp and brilliant, was awakened, and now he was thinking faster than a watch in perfect condition could tick as he gathered himself up. “And perhaps not even that. Call the crew back. We will compensate them. I need you to do this, Shay.”

“All right?” I blinked at him in confusion as he leaned over the bed, his knee on the edge of the mattress as he caught at the back of my neck, pulled me to him, left a chaste kiss lingering at the corner of my mouth. “Where are we going?”

“London. Take nothing but ballast.” I breathed between my teeth, nodded as Haytham pulled away, tucking his hair back behind his ear, took up his candle again.

“Sir?” He stilled at my voice, turned to look over his shoulder at me, his hand on the door and the letters tucked beneath his arm. “Is there anything else?”

“My apologies for waking you, and I will explain myself later. Try to get some sleep, Captain Cormac.”

“Aye,” I watched him open the door to my room and leave, his stockinged feet quiet on the floor as he shut the door behind him, left me in darkness, profoundly awake and rattled to the core. Whatever it was, it was important, and frightfully so. In fact, I could hear him knocking on Thomas’ door, pausing as it creaked open, and I focused, my second sight sharpening my hearing as Haytham told Thomas to get dressed and ride like hell to Fort George, no matter what it took, and to fetch back Charles Lee no later than dawn.

Well, there went my easy shore leave with Grand Master Kenway in my bed.

I shut my eyes and fell back boneless to my bed, spread my arms out and hissed a half-dozen choice words between my teeth, thumped my fist into the mattress once. “God’s wounds, Haytham,” I snapped, teeth grit.

I had really been starting to look forward to bleeding in the comfort and privacy of my _own bed_ for once, after ten months of having to navigate the _Morrígan_ when all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball round a hot brick and wish for death. Why could nothing ever just sit for so much as five minutes.

I had a Precursor Box to be chasing, not—whatever this was.

Damnit.

 

 

For the next four days, I saw neither hide nor hair of Haytham or Charles Lee. Haytham was somewhere—I woke up from a night of fitful sleep that same night he had left in a rush and found a loose hair on his pillow, his side of the bed still heavy with his weight, and again the night after—but I caught no more than brief glimpses of his cloak or the sharp crack of his footstep or the distant call of his voice afterward. Charles I saw even less of, skulking about on Haytham’s shadow as he no doubt was; not catching one did not lend to finding the other. As per usual, once rejoined, they were inseparable.

It was not so surprising we did not cross our paths, since I was not much ashore. Christopher and I spent dawn to dusk at the docks, overseeing what had been a leisurely repair to the _Morrígan_ turned into a desperate all-hands call to have her shipshape in a period of time that would work every man aboard her to the bone.

But we would manage it.

The fourth night, Gist and I returned to Fort Arsenal well past midnight, too bone tired to do anything but sleep. I was washing up, wiping off the sweat from the day when a hand knocked upon my door. “Come in,” I said, at least passably decent in only my breeches, as the door opened inward.

Charles stood there, and I lowered the cloth I was holding. He shut the door behind him, tilted his head toward the bottle of whiskey on my sideboard. I waved him to it easy enough, finished wiping my face and set the cloth aside. Charles did not speak, pouring himself a finger of whiskey instead, which he tossed back before he sank down into the chair beside my desk, his expressive face shadowed as he pressed it into the cup of his hand.

He looked...Charles Lee was not a man well given to the perfections of hygiene, but usually he at least looked presentable, dressed-up if struggling to keep himself together. At the present moment, he did not. “You look like shit,” I told him. “Go to bed, Charles.” He shook his head, his mouth pinched.

“If wishing could make it so.” He rubbed his eyes again and looked back up at me, and I could see how poorly he looked now in further detail, the exhaustion that hung beneath his eyes, the tension in his jaw, the lack of attention paid to his hair, thrown around his face and badly battered. “Too much remains undone. I needed to stop reading before my eyes began to burn.” Charles rubbed his face again. “Cormac, has Haytham been with you?”

I stared at him, crossed my arms over my chest. “What is this, some kind of misplaced jealousy, because green doesn’t become you, Charles.”

“No, damnit, and you well _know_ it.” I felt my hackles raising as Charles slapped his fist to his thigh. “This is about Haytham, not whoever’s warming his cock.” I bared my teeth at him. “He hasn’t been to my bed the last two nights, nor has he gone to his own bed. I—I am worried for him.”

If Charles was voicing such mutinous thoughts, then there really was something to worry about. I dragged my hand down my face, my skin loose with exhaustion, and leaned my hip against my toilet as I considered. “He’s not been to my bed. I thought he was with you. Lord knows you’ve not seen one another in long enough.” Charles huffed an ugly laugh. “I’ll take that as a no, then.”

“What little use I’ve had of my bed these last three nights it has been in the utter peace of my own solitude.”

Discomfited by the implications of that thought, I turned to the window and closed the shutters for the night. There was a clear third option, but it did not sit well with me. “Has he just been leaving when you retire?”

“As usual when he gets like this, yes.” I couldn’t speak to it; my own companionship with Haytham was relatively new, all things considered. It had formed slow, and come to fruition just before Hope’s near-death last fall. Charles had been Haytham’s sworn brother and companion for years before I had even met him. “Or just not following me. If he’s not been with either of us, or in his own bed—“ I realized, belatedly, that this was not some absurd Charles jealousy problem, demanding he not share Haytham with anyone, let alone some outcast Assassin like myself. Even if he was rarely that unkind, it could have been sensible with his usual attitude.

“He’s not slept in two days,” I said, finishing his thought for him. I turned back to face him, met Charles’ eyes, and he nodded to me. “And you think he shan’t again before we set sail.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“What do you propose?”

“Nothing.” Charles levered himself up out of the chair at last with reluctance, dragged his hand over his face, his skin stretching with the pressure. “It would be like trying to stop a cannon from firing once the powder was lit. I just wanted to be certain and to find my suspicions in the matter proved true.” He nodded to me. “Ply him with extra tea and hope he’s forced to rest soon.”

“Charles,” I said, and he froze before he left my room, waiting for me to speak. “Did he see fit to share with you whatever the matter is at present?”

“No. He said it can wait until all hands.” I pursed my lips. Charles shrugged one shoulder: mute acceptance of Haytham being himself, cryptic to the end.

“Thank you.” He nodded, still not looking back at me, and left the room, and myself in confusion and discontent within it, my lips a tight line and my shoulders tense. I changed back into my shirt, tried fruitlessly to sleep in my own bed, and then climbed out and went looking for Christopher, shoved him over in his bed until there was room for me, and crammed in beside him, the weight of his body sprawled over mine as he snored into my ear not helping my sleep any, but at least soothing my roiling spirits.

 

 

Haytham called an all-hands meeting the sixth day back in New York. He first spoke to the rank-and-file Disciples en-masse while Christopher and I oversaw the finishing touches to have the _Morrígan_ shipshape for a transatlantic voyage, and then for dinner we returned to Fort Arsenal and the Knights and Masters meeting, this one indoors in the room that had once been an inner barracks, but was now converted to some kind of a conference room with a large table and plenty of chairs.

We’d had meetings in it before that I had attended, but I had never seen it as full as it was now. It was more than just the usual suspects that were waiting for Christopher and I when we returned—Thomas, startlingly sober for once, William, and Jack were all almost always in New York or near enough for easy access, they I had all expected. In addition, Dr. Church had ridden down from Boston and was complaining vociferously about it upon our arrival, clearly cross and put-out about the present situation, and he was joined by a woman a handful of years younger than me, dressed for riding, who introduced herself as Margaret Gage and shook hands firmly despite her dainty appearance.

Colonel Monro’s chair, at the top left of the table, was empty, and with an all hands meeting called for true for the first time since his death, I felt his loss clawing at the back of my throat, and I had to look away before George’s ghost injured me irreparably.

Food had been served by the time the door opened, admitting Charles and Haytham. Charles looked worse than when I had last seen him, but he was still at least properly dressed, if in clothes that were clearly in desperate need of a good laundering. He had even managed a shave, combed his hair, and he took the seat at Haytham’s immediate right, as he always did.

Haytham sat down at the head of the table a moment later, although _sat_ was perhaps too strong a term. He really pulled the chair out and then sort of fell into it in an upright position, dropped a haphazard pile of papers onto the table in front of him, letters and documents and books, bags of coin balanced atop the pile. He collapsed backwards, sprawling himself out entirely in the chair, and shut his eyes, dropping his arms like they were lead weights at his shoulders to hang over the back, and then kicked his feet up onto the table in a display of an attitude more lazes-faire than anything I had ever seen from him.

He looked—

In ‘58, I had seen Haytham laid out with a fever after a bayonet wound in his thigh had festered, and he had looked better then than he did now. His hair was lank and unwashed; he was seven days unshaved and sporting a patchy, early-greying beard that made him look at least ten years older than his thirty-four. The ever-present shadows beneath his eyes were practically yawning caverns, his skin was sallow and pale. He was barely decent; he was wearing no waistcoat, and no stock either, his long throat bare.

He didn’t move once he had sat down. “My apologies,” he said at last, and his voice was raw with exhaustion. He sounded like I did, after I shouted at the crew through a nightlong gale. “For my present state. I’ve not slept more than perhaps three or four hour in the last six days, so I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“Zounds,” Jack hissed. Haytham cracked a smile at him.

“I’m about to be at sea a month, Master Weeks.” He yawned, covered it with one hand and then dropped his arm back to his side. “I can sleep then.”

“What was so important you needed to call us all here?” Margaret spoke up, her voice firm as she looked at him. “It was hardly easy to get away from Montreal, Master Kenway, and I don’t appreciate being met by you in such a fashion. This is hardly appropriate.”

Haytham yawned again. “Be that as it may, Mistress Gage, we’re stuck with one another.” He sighed, groaned, and finally rolled upright, put his feet down (although Christopher, who had his on the table before Haytham ever even arrived, kept his up) and pulled his chair closer. “Thank you all for coming. Charles will be taking minutes to dispatch to Madeleine, since there was no time to get her up from New Orleans, and I will be carrying a copy to John, as I hope to perhaps be able to bring him back upon our return.

“For that purpose, then, I have some small orders of business before embarking on an explanation for what has been causing such chaos. First, I should desire Captain Cormac to rise.” I did so, confused, even as Gist stood next to me, set his hand on my shoulder.

“Master Kenway,” he said, and Haytham gave him a look that could melt lead. “I want to sponsor Shay to the rank of Master Templar.”

“Sit down, Gist, he has no need of your sponsorship. You have beaten me to his intended honors.” Gist sat back down, left me standing alone. “Unless any among our number has some reason to speak against his attaining the rank, I name Shay Cormac Master Templar. Shay, have you any reason to deny said promotion?” My mouth was dry, my tongue stuck flat.

“No, Sir,” I managed it after a moment. “I’m unsure if I’ve earned it—“ Haytham cut me off by gesturing to the empty seat to his left, and I had to close my eyes and look away, take several short, deep breaths to regain my balance. “I couldn’t,” my voice cracked.

“He asked it of me before he died, Shay. In his final correspondence, Colonel Monro asked you be named his successor should he not survive the campaign, if you were to earn it. I believe you have done above and beyond anything either he, or I, could have expected of you.” I swallowed around the lump that caught in my throat. “As those among us are soon to learn, you are fully responsible for the destruction of the Assassin Brotherhood within the Colonies, and without unnecessary bloodshed, as well as the effective end to their entire naval fleet.” I could hear a smile in his voice, and I glanced back to him once I had schooled my face to see that Haytham was, indeed, giving me a wry look. “I am not exaggerating when I say that among our number you are now the most accomplished; I cannot pretend to claim nearly so powerful a devotion to the cause.” Once more, he gestured to George’s empty seat. “You have earned it, Shay.”

Finally, I forced my legs to move, and crossed the few short steps to the seat to Haytham’s left, set my hand upon its back, and it was there that I stopped once more, the world sapping my strength in my grief. It was just a chair, the same as the others about the table. Just a chair. There had never been any official hierarchy past the ranks of Master in the Southern Department Rite, although both Haytham and George had told me things within Europe were significantly more complex due to the archaic structure of the Order there, but it had been clear from my very earliest dealings with the Templar Order that within the Southern Department, there was the Grand Master and his second—Charles—and then the Senior Master Templar.

That had been George, although he had always made clear his appointment in the Colonies was temporary. He was of the Northern Department, and had duties waiting for him upon his return to Europe. When he was not in residence, that role fell to William, the only other Master Templar among our number.

Who I had now surpassed. Who did not look at all put out by my superseding his authority; if anything, he was grinning with good humor and indulgence. Beneath the leather of my gloves, I could feel George’s ring around my finger, the burn scars on my fingertips and the base of my right palm from where it had marked them tingling. I let out a slow breath, knowing it was his memory within me that I carried so diligently, reminding me of its presence and the reason for my exercises.

I sat down, let out my breath, and realized belatedly that my fellows had been congratulating me. Gist even blew me a kiss; lewd as ever.

Haytham continued, sorting through his papers as he spoke, his glasses sliding down his nose, “William, I have some need for you to take care of a few financial matters that have come to my attention. Benjamin, if you would be so kind...” I let Haytham talk, knowing none of this was meant for my attention, as my presence would be alongside him helming the _Morrígan_ when we left tomorrow, and instead I focused on where I was, _who_ I was, tried to calm the rapid beat of my heart and the ache it left within me.

As much as I was glad, proud of what I had accomplished and who I had become, I ached that George was not with us. To have taken his seat, even upon his request, without him there—oh, how I missed him!

“Now,” Haytham’s voice brought me back from the morass of my thoughts, “Master Cormac, if you would be so kind to relate the incidents of these last ten months?” He nodded to Gist. “Gist, please, do continue to fill in. I will refrain from adding my own version of things, as I was there for the experience, and I will take a nap.” He waved a hand for us to continue. “Wake me when you’re done, won’t you, Charles?”

“Of course,” he murmured, and Haytham, to all appearances, laid back in his chair, his head rolled over the back of it, shut his eyes, and promptly passed out.

“I’ll find a map,” Christopher said, standing and leaving the room as I found the rest of the Order staring at me in expectation. I squared my shoulders and started the narrative of what had culminated in the sinking of the _Storm Fortress_ as it had begun the night I had nearly died upon Hope’s poison. When Gist returned with a map, he and I worked together to explain the situations that had arisen upon each leg of the journey—our contest with _Le Gerfaut_ , Cook and Haytham’s intervention, the exhausting race to catch Achilles and Liam, and then our subsequent exit with nearly all of the Brotherhood’s ammunition, weapons, maps, and charts.

The latter had been Gist’s idea. Christopher had muttered something about it not counting as murder if we let the elements and poor helmsmen kill them, and I had been unable to come up with an argument against his sound logic.

It had been a long journey, first into the interior wilds of Canada and then back out, to Baffin Bay, when we had come across the _Storm Fortress_ and only barely survived our encounter with the combined Assassin and French fleet; we’d been forced to limp to Cape Dorset with both our masts badly damaged, get them patched, and then make our way slowly back to St. John’s, where the _Morrígan_ had been in dock for nearly two full months.

It had been maddening, but Haytham had been right at the time that there had been no purpose in trying to call for someone to help us. By the time that any letters managed to reach the fleet, the _Morrígan_ would be seaworthy again, so the crew had spent the better part of two months sitting on their hands while Haytham, Christopher, and I had started forming plans for tracking the Precursor Box. And then, in July, we had finally left St. John’s and returned to New York.

By the time Christopher and I had finished telling the story of what had befallen us, there were more questions than answers among our fellows, and we talked in the end until supper was served and Charles at last woke Haytham with a hand on his arm.

Supper was at least a welcome break from work, and the discussion turned from Rite business, from the blood I had spilled to win us peace, to other matters. After we had eaten and Christopher had once again produced an absurd amount of alcohol from wherever it was he kept it, Haytham cleared his throat for everyone’s attention.

“Master Cormac, I have some need of you to discuss matters of the fleet, but that can wait and can be dealt with during our voyage. Before I allow you to all turn to your own respective evening entertainments, there is one more item which needs our attention.” He adjusted his glasses and took out the letter that I had seen him reading our first night back, smoothed it on the table before him. “This letter is dated to early June, sent by an independent agent in London who has some interest in our cause—before you ask, Benjamin, I trust this agent explicitly and with my life, so do not lecture me on the legitimacy of this missive.

“I will not bother you all with the less pressing details of the letter. Suffice it to say, the following has accelerated all of our plans.” Haytham cleared his throat, lifted the letter up, and read from it. “‘I am unsure as to how much you have heard of business here, but it has become clear to many of us that this war will likely not end, no matter how successful the American campaign is, without some distinct change to the government here. Parliament is aboard Pitt’s boat, and Pitt is a man made for war.

‘I spoke to your dear friend this past fortnight, and he admitted to me in lieu of your company that his best companion is firmly in favor of a peace, but he is loathe to take any action that could potentially jeopardize all his causes here. I have pondered this difficulty and come to the conclusion that, should you think it mete to take the situation into your own hands, I could effect some opportunity equal to the matter no later than the end of the year. I trust in your discretion, and remind you of our previous successes in this vein.’”

Finished reading, Haytham folded the letter up once more, returned it to his envelope.

“I’m not sure I understand,” Jack said slowly, speaking perhaps for all of us. Haytham took his glasses off, folded them atop the letter and sighed as he steepled his fingers.

“She is saying that the Prince of Wales is strongly opposed to the continuation of this war, but that as long as King George remains atop the throne, it will be unlikely to come to fruition in any speed.” Haytham looked to us all in turn, one by one, his mouth a thin line. “I believe that you may all conjecture as to the rest.”

William let out a low, slow whistle, and I slumped back in my chair, my hand pressed to my mouth as the implication of Haytham’s words settled in, their presence a physical weight upon my shoulders and atop my back. I shut my eyes. “Shit,” Margaret said, her voice tight in emphasis. I heard someone stand, and Thomas’ footsteps left, the door opening and shutting. Gist breathed a horrified sigh, and Charles swallowed, audibly.

“We depart at dawn for London,” Haytham continued, his voice soft. “I am leaving Charles in command in my stead, as he has leave to remain in New York for some time longer. I trust all of your discretion, for a single word breathed awry could doom us all. I do not know if I can speak for every member of this Rite, but I have no interest in a noose just yet. May the Father of Understanding guide us.”


	4. ACT II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “As I live, I will never again see you betray yourself and that which you know to be true for the exigencies of another’s station.”

ACT II:  
_what, lucius, ho!_ _i_ _cannot, by the progress of the stars, give guess how near to day._

 

The moment that the _Morrígan_ cleared New York harbor, Haytham yawned into the back of his hand, bid myself and Gist good day, and vanished below into the Captain’s Cabin. With that brief courtesy paid to us, he summarily dismissed himself from any useful service he might have paid upon the quarterdeck, and presumably, dropped to instant sleep.

Indeed, when I had seen us safely to sea, my stomach tight with my worries for how well the _Morrígan_ would take to a sea voyage when she had previously never been truly designed for such a crossing, I finished out the second shift of the day, ate, and retired to my cabin to sleep until the midnight shift at the helm, leaving Gist at the wheel.

What I found waiting for me in my cabin was approximately what I had expected. Haytham had stripped down to his shirt, breeches, and stockings, and passed out face-first on my bed. He had not even made it all the way onto the mattress; one arm and half his legs both draped over the side. He was snoring softly, completely undone in his exhaustion.

I followed his example, and managed to get him the rest of the way in bed enough that we could both sleep.

It took me as long as it usually did to find sleep—it eluded me at the best of times, and when I was exhausted, it became even more futile an effort to catch it. It was as if I had to live out the punishment of my conscience over again a hundredfold any time I needed Morpheus’ respite. Part of it, though, was certainly how unused I was to Haytham in any sleep so deep. He had barely stirred when I had come in, and as little again when I had dragged him into bed, and his present state (sprawled like a hot blanket over my chest, snoring into my ear, some of his hair in my mouth) certainly did nothing to ease that. I had grown used to his presence in my bed being mostly awake, since he kept hours odd even to me, but in his current state, his sleep was, for once, actually restful.

Every man in our world, who held currency in blood equal to that which they held in coin, dealt with their demons in different ways. I had known enough now of our brethren, on either side of the conflict or of unrelated ranks, that I had learned how each of them found some form of self-flagellation when the world would not enact that punishment for them in the ratio their conscience demanded. Some found solace in care for their fellows, as Hope and George had, or in anger, as Liam and Kesegowaase had drawn from that well of fury upon numerous occasions. Some took easier ways out—Gist was but one of many who had found respite in the bottle _ad nauseam_.

And then there were men like Haytham and I. He had described it once to me in an offhand remark as _soldier’s heart_ , a thing he had seen in his time serving during the War of Austrian Succession: soldiers, shattered as much by combat as by that they had witnessed, would return home changed men, permanently transfigured by their experiences. Everyone took to it differently, but the hallmarks were a depression that impeded all aspects of life, a frustration for the forces of justice, an emotional volatility that raised its head at the least becoming of times, a severing of those close relationships which might have better supported the man in need, and a restlessness that superseded the needs of sleep.

In sleep lurked dreams, and in dreams lurked nightmares. Landscapes full of the dead, drawing rooms of corpses, the scent of carnage and fire and flood. My own nightmares, the terrors that woke me soaked in sweat and panting, that had driven me on numerous occasions to join Gist and partake in his own particular numbing mistress, were often of Lisbon.

Of late, though, they had been more often of other things. The worst thing of those dreams was that once they had more fodder, they only became greater in equality to that terror. Since I had put Hope into that near-death sleep, they had been almost entirely of her last night—a period that hardly needed to be rendered more agonizing to me than it already was, given I was near death and almost hallucinating from poison most of the time—or of Liam. Always, always Liam.

In that way, Gist and Haytham, each in their own way, made fine bedfellows. One would be to sodden with drink to wake when I thrashed out of bed, soaked in cold sweat and feeling sick, shouting in my sleep; the other would be wide awake already, taken from his own slumbers, and would find no reason to be bothered by my outbursts.

Haytham had never shared with me that which haunted his own sleep, and I cared for him deeply enough I would not press. If he wished to share he would when he was ready; he had not demanded of me prior to my being ready to share with willingness, and I would do him an equal courtesy.

Haytham only woke once that night, to stumble to the window at the back of the cabin and crack it, pissing over the side of the _Morrígan_ , and I was too tired to properly chastise him for not at least going above topside to do his business. I just swore at him under my breath when he closed the window and came back to my side—an ill-mood he soothed back out of me with a stubbled kiss atop the side of my neck, just behind my ear, as he threw his arm back around my waist and once more dropped off.

When I rose at midnight to take the shift, he did not so much as stir, and that pattern kept itself straight for the next day and a half. If he was waking to eat or drink, it was during my shift, but it did not seem clear that he was.

It was not until our third day at sea, Gist and I bent over the charts atop my desk as we discussed our trajectory under our breaths, that Haytham rolled over in bed and stuck his hand out to where I was eating a hot pasty. He didn’t say anything, just held his hand out expectantly until I broke it in half and pressed it into his palm. “If you get crumbs on my sheets, you’re cleaning them,” I told him, and he made a quiet noise of assent, confirming he’d heard me, and rolled back over, apparently eating facedown.

Indeed, that sign of life was the evidence that he was once more returning to the realm of the living, for although he slept the following night straight through at my side, he turned up on the quarterdeck at midmorning. “Don’t look now,” Gist said, loud enough his voice carried, “Seems we’ve found a way to raise the dead.”

“Amusing,” Haytham returned, voice dry. “Unfortunately, unless you’ve found the Shroud during my repose, you shall be forced to contend with merely the very tired.” He had been up for a while, clearly—he had bathed from a basin, shaved properly at last (a relief, for he did not look well with a full beard) and washed his hair. He had changed from his uniform to civilian clothes, a well-fitted yellow short waistcoat, black breeches, his usual boots, no coat in deference to the weather, his cuffs worn loose to disguise the weight of his bracers beneath them, his sword belt taken down from over his shoulder to round his waist. “How is our heading, Captain?”

“We’re certainly on our way to London, Sir.”

He huffed through his nose rather than ask me for any further elaboration on the matter, and leaned onto the railing in his usual place at my left, Gist casually at my right. “Shall we make it in good time?”

“Hard to say as yet, Sir. We’re still quite close to land, but unless some squall comes out of nowhere, I shouldn’t think it will take us longer than a month for the crossing.” The _Morrígan_ ’s greatest gift, after all, was her speed. We had picked the right time of year for the crossing, as the winds were quite strong, and we’d been able to keep all sails since we had left New York harbor. With only ballast, I should have been surprised indeed if many other merchant or privateer vessels in the Colonies could have been making such good time.

With the wind at our sails, whipping our hair about our faces and lashing the sails above us, it was hard to be too worried about what was awaiting us in London. The crew below us picked up a tune, and I shut my eyes, leaning onto the wheel to hold the rudder steady, humming along.

The best part of being at sea was the reassurance that I could simply shut everything else away, and enjoy the freedom of the breeze and the surf. There was plenty to be done, but nothing could be changed once we were at the mercy of the wind and the waves; we would get where we were going when the _Morrígan_ was good and ready, no matter how hard I tried to push her. That was why Haytham always slept better aboard, after all—he couldn’t get bogged down in work when “work” was limited to whatever he had brought with him. Once he ran out (and he would) he would be bored stiff.

Gist yawned and stretched. “I’d better turn in,” he said at last, scrubbing his hand over his face. He had stayed past his usual time to turn in by some hours, and I was about to wave him off when Haytham cleared his throat.

“I shan’t impress upon you if you truly must go below, but if you could spare another twenty minutes at the tiller, Gist, I should appreciate an opportunity to speak to the Captain.” I opened my eyes, glanced at Haytham, but his impassive face was as dashed difficult to read as always. Gist beside me shrugged.

“Certainly.” I let him take the wheel without fanfare and followed Haytham as he left the quarterdeck and went to the rigging. He did not explain himself, but simply began to climb upward. I hesitated a moment before following him—he really was just a particularly large cat. He always preferred being up high.

When we reached the crow’s nest, I waved the lad currently on duty to head down, and joined Haytham where he was leaning against the mast and reached up to hang from the rigging, looking out over the wide blue of the ocean below us. “Breakfast?” Haytham asked, holding out an apple for me he had apparently produced from his pocket, and I took it, polishing it on my shirt before I took a bite. “My apologies for having been a bother. I did not intend to sleep quite so long.”

“Better you catch up after a week than I complain of you sleeping too much,” I shrugged at him. “You’re not so poor a bedfellow, Sir. Just not used to you not being restless. You look a sight better, though.” He made a face of mute acceptance—even the hollows beneath his eyes were back nearly to their usual shadow—and broke the biscuit he had brought for himself apart slightly within his handkerchief. He had softened it with coffee, knowing him, and it crumbled easily in his hand. “You needed it.”

“I did,” he admitted. “That was pushing even my own reserves of strength, however impressive they may be. I had not been expecting to leave so very soon upon our return. There’s so much to do in New York—this could set us back months.”

“How long do you think we’ll be needed in London?”

“I should hope no longer than a few weeks, but...” he trailed off, and I hissed between my teeth. Chances were, if we were poorly delayed, we could be trapped over the winter, because the _Morrígan_ would like as not be unable to take a rough winter crossing.

“Point taken,” I said, let him nod mutely. “Did you bring me up here just to speak of that?” I continued, and he hummed a negative around whatever piece of biscuit he was chewing as patiently as possible. “And why leave Christopher out of it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Because, as much as I appreciate Gist’s...finer qualities, they do come attached to some less redeeming features, like his inability to keep his flap shut.” I choked, snorting on my apple. There was just _something_ about Haytham’s impeccable accent and manners that, when coupled with the language he picked up from Gist, myself, Hickey, or Charles, made common insults sound thrice as absurd. I knew for a fact that he could swear like any seaman I’d ever known, but I found myself forgetting it most times. When Haytham continued, however, it was along lines I had not at all been prepared for. “How much do you know of the Templar Rite’s leadership structure, Shay?”

I blinked at him. “Achilles never spoke of it beyond the differences in Knights and Masters, and George told me that it wasn’t important yet.”

“He certainly was the sort to leave things until the last minute,” Haytham said, quietly, and I felt my chest tighten, had to look away from him as I bit the bottom off of the apple. Aye, George had been—he had avoided telling me of his death sentence of an assignment until the morning he had left from my cabin for it. He had murmured me back to sleep, told me he was just going topside, and not come back.

“I didn’t even know that the Southern Department _had_ a Grand Master until Christopher explained it to me,” I admitted, and Haytham looked at me, eyebrows cocked. “George mentioned it, but without elaboration. Christopher had to explain the matter to me, before Fort William Henry. I had been confused,” I added, rubbing the back of my neck, “Why I had to wait so long to join the Rite.”

“Any member of the order above Knight may sponsor a new Disciple, but only a Master may sponsor a new Templar at Knight. Either way, those both require the oversight of the Grand Master of the Rite that the recruit is being inducted to. The Colonel wanted you inducted earlier,” Haytham admitted, “But I was convalescing in London until April, so it was, unfortunately, delayed. Otherwise, I believe both the Colonel and I should have wanted to see him present you for your Oaths.”

“He did,” I said quietly, and clenched my hand, George’s Templar ring, badly scorched and partly melted by the fire, tight on my finger. “With me every day, he is.” Haytham’s warm hand on my shoulder was a kind gesture, one I thanked him for with my smile. “But what is it you want to tell me? Can’t have been reminiscing about our dearly departed.”

“Disciples answer to Knights; Knights answer to Masters; Masters to their Rite’s Grand Master. That is simple,” Haytham broke off another piece of biscuit as he spoke, and he began to pace the small confines of the nest, his boots hollow on the wood below our feet. “But beyond it becomes somewhat more...complex. There are currently somewhere around thirty Grand Masters in the world—do not take that as an official estimate; I am not privy to the precise sum. We Grand Masters oversee our Rites, but we report to a higher power: the Inner Sanctum oversees the worldwide operations of the Templar Order.” I nodded, but he continued as if he hadn’t noticed, totally focused on his words as he spoke, as if he was trying to only tell me part of a whole. “The Inner Sanctum, or the Council of Nine, whichever you prefer, is made up of a selection of Master and Grand Master Templars, each overseeing some different aspect of the Templar Order.

“All this has been upon my thoughts for when I was in London last, recuperating from the injury I took during the attack that killed my mentor, I was offered his open position on the Sanctum, and I cited my ill health as a reason to hold off on accepting it. They offered it to me again just before Hope’s...well, and I took the offer, although I did not receive confirmation of it until we arrived back in New York due to our—delay.” Ah, yes—our spring in drydock. “As soon as we return from this trip, I may very well be a man torn nearly asunder by competing responsibilities, as I am now in charge of overseeing the Templar Fleet you have been so kindly building for us.” He shot me a wry look. “Although I am certain we both know my _oversight_ shall really be simply signing off on whatever it is you hand to me to approve. I trust your knowledge of the seas far beyond that of my own; I would merely slow your success were I to attempt more detailed orders.”

“So...is this all about that, then?” I was still unsure the purpose for which he had brought this up. It seemed a mighty lot of words to really just say _keep doing everything you’ve been doing_. “Was it the Inner Sanctum that sent you that letter?”

“Heavens no; it truly did come from a neutral party. The Inner Sanctum is strongly against meddling in affairs in so involved a way. They are far more of the _hurry up and wait_ sort of governance; they want to see how things will play out on the behalf of individuals before they leverage their weight. Very unlike the Assassins in that way. No, this is about what you said to me.”

“I say a _lot_ of things to you, Hayth,” I pointed out, and he shook his head and turned away from me, his hands folded behind his back.

“’What kind of world are we making if we cannot show mercy?’” Hearing my own words in Haytham’s voice was strange, and I watched the broad angle of his shoulders as he stared off into the distance over the endless blue of the ocean before us. “Shay, you are more right than you could ever possibly know. But the inverse is also true—there is a time for mercy, and there is a time too for slaughter. I have never met a man more attuned to the forces of justice than you, and it is _that_ which has remained with me these past months. For, when given the opportunity to take revenge, you have turned it away time and time again; even when you longed for it. You have proven yourself cognizant of the dangers of an overzealous hand with a blade, dangers which I myself am prone to, and have seen the dangers when too many are culled from the fold.

“Before my...injury, I served the Inner Sanctum through Reginald’s command, a sword wielded to great success by my predecessor. But now, as Grand Master and as a member of the Council of Nine, as well as no longer quite the man I was before, I cannot possibly continue that duty, even in a restricted sense. Therefore, it only stands to reason that I find some individual with appropriate skill to replace me.” Haytham turned back at last and gave me a self-deprecating look. “It will surprise you, I am sure, to know that there are very few among the ranks of either side who can claim to be traitors to one cause or the other.”

“But Templars aren’t much susceptible to their own skills,” I said, reading his intent. He nodded. “Can’t be easy, to send a Templar to kill Templars, unless they’re all men like Smith and Washington.”

“Certainly not. You’ve met enough to know better.”

“So you need an Assassin to hunt Templars.” I couldn’t keep the note out of hurt from my voice; I was tired of being a weapon.

“No. I need a _Templar_ to hunt Templars—but that is not what I want, either.” Haytham turned back to me, rubbed his chin. “I want a man who I can trust to see true, even when all others turn away. You, Shay, are not one to turn a blind eye and idle in the face of inhumanity. I want someone who I can trust to see clearly, and not only to tell me if there is rot in my basket, but to remove it if he must. I killed good men and true for Reginald. You did the same for Achilles, and then again for me. I do not want to see you, or indeed any other replacement for my sword arm, held in thrall to the whims of politics and ideology.

“I want to offer you something else. Answer, nominally, to myself and the Inner Sanctum. But in practice, be beholden only to yourself and your sense of things. I want to allow you the space to do that which you believe is essential, Shay, and nothing else.” He caught my eyes, an unusual affectation for him, and held them. I could not for the life of me think of another time he had done the same for so long. “As I live, I will never again see you betray yourself and that which you know to be true for the exigencies of another’s station.”

Damn him, too, for I knew it to be true. I rubbed the back of my neck.

“Let me think on it. Would this be part and parcel to my searching for the box?”

“Only if you decide you are capable of rising to the task. Otherwise, no, you are free to search however you should please, in whatever method you believe suits the ends. You have proven yourself more than trustworthy, Shay; I believe I am speaking both for Colonel Monro’s expectations of you as well as my own experience with your expertise that you are fully capable of knowing what is best for you and yours.”

“Aye, and what if you should betray your oaths and promises?” I asked, still holding his gaze. It was almost unnerving—I had never met anyone with eyes like Haytham’s. They were grey, but a very strange sort of color. They had an almost metallic sheen to them. Staring at them too long made me feel like I was looking just past the edge of the skin and suit he wore, and to the man beneath, and the man beneath was...something I wasn’t sure I was ready to see in all its form. “What then?”

His voice was soft and fervent when he replied, watching my face with an almost frightening intensity: “Believe me when I say that if I should ever fall from grace in such a manner that you would demand my head for it, I should not only expect your swift descent, but should relish it.”

There wasn’t much of a response to that but to kiss him, for it was not often a man offered you his life in the palm of his hands.

 

 

We arrived in London after twenty-four days, eight of which I had spent abed in furious agony, curled on my side and sweating through my sheets with a hot brick pressed to the base of my stomach, swearing myself blue in the face at Haytham’s total lack of patience. Twenty-four days was a blessed fast crossing, due to the confluence of the winds and the seas, and would complete whatever urgent timeline he found himself faced by. But it also meant that I had to be miserable on a boat, and not in my own bed. The only fortune I could count in the “timely” arrival of my monthlies was that it had come and gone before we ever docked, so I was fully coherent and free of the laudanum cloud when we disembarked in London.

The port at London docks was the largest I had ever seen. It had been nearly twenty years since my last visit to Britain, and while we were assailed by those same sights and smells that heralded a landing anywhere else, there was such a greater volume of them that it was nearly overwhelming. The clamor and clangor of the docks, the distant sounds of ropemaking and tarring, the scent of backwash from the sewage in the river, the cries of voices and gulls in rough counterpoint, the vibrancy of life upon the shore—it was all I could to do breathe it all in and fill my very being with it. London, so painfully alive, so massive and mighty in all her glory, and here was but a fraction of what secrets she held in her bosom.

Gist had never been to London; his travels around by ship had been limited entirely to the Western side of the Atlantic, and as passenger besides for most of them. So he looked even more astounded by the vibrancy of life than I did, one hand holding his hat to his head as he stared around in slack-jawed amazement, unable to look away from the throngs that crowded every inch of dock space below us as we got tied off. “London rather does have that affect on you,” Haytham agreed, his dry voice dripping with his usual brand of straight-faced amusement. “Get your gawping out while you can, Master Gist. There is plenty to be done and little time to do it in.”

“Maybe for you two,” Gist replied, “But I intend to make the best of as _many_ bars as is humanly possible.”

“Then all I ask is that you force yourself to remain sober for at least _one_ night!” Haytham laughed at him. “I cannot even imagine how impossible this imposition must be, but I need you to meet our contact at least _somewhat_ presentable.” Indeed, Haytham had demanded both of us change out of our uniforms, apparently because his contact was an _interested_ party, but not necessarily a _supportive_ one. As simple as our mantles were, they were presently out of fashion, and would stand out significantly enough that his friend would be riled.

Haytham had changed as well, removing his usual dark blue backwoods gentleman’s clothes for a posh suit he had brought: he stood now in a tailcoat of cream with black piping and red embroidery atop a red waistcoat with black embroidery, and the color combination brought out the grey of his eyes, made his black hair look even more stark against his coloring. He had even changed from his preferred pair of stiffened leather boots to gentleman’s riding boots, high-topped against his breeches—he had produced from somewhere a handsome black and gold hat that added an extra air of elegance to his ensemble, and while he looked naked without his sword belt, I knew why he had left it and his pistols off to be delivered to our lodgings.

He looked a member of the gentry: handsome, noble in his bearing and education, returning to his native soil. He was quite dashing, too—I was unused to seeing him performing the role of Grand Master in an environment that was more suited to battles of wits than battles of swords, and Gist’s definition of “out of uniform” extending to undoing the buttons that held his mantle to his coat only made him look even more fine by comparison.

Sometimes, I almost thought Christopher did it intentionally. Just acted, looked, and _sounded_ like a damn fool to make people take him less seriously. It would have had merit as an argument had he not been an old, hardheaded drunk with more bravado than sense.

I’d remembered my red brocade coat, the one I had stolen from the Assassins in New York, and it had a mantle I’d been able to strip without damaging the body of the coat beneath it, peeling the seams free with my hidden blade during the tail end of our voyage. I felt almost naked without the mark of our Order—even though I wore the ring, I had been in the uniform mantle for the better part of the last five years.

When we were tied off, Haytham tipped his hat. “Gentlemen, I will see you at Queen Anne’s Square,” and promptly left down the gangplank, moving in that way he had, the coiled carnivore ready to strike, hiding beneath the flawless veneer of a man given over to the finer things in life. Without him, Gist and I saw the _Morrígan_ safely into port, being certain to make sure all of her documentation was good, as she would be idling at anchor for an unknown amount of time. Even with the crew mostly nearby or aboard overnight, I hated leaving her anywhere for too long.

It was irrational of me. She was a ship; she was meant to be left behind when we went ashore. But I had lost her once, my dearest friend and companion, and I would not see it happen again in my lifetime.

When we were certain that the customs officers believed that the _Morrígan_ really was riding only ballast, and we had gotten all of our paperwork stamped and sealed, I set the crew to being certain she was in ship shape, laboring under the trusty eye of our Second Mate, Kerry Johnson, a foul-mouthed Acadian who we had picked up in ‘58 in a skirmish near Percée, and who had made her presence aboard the ship a permanent one by embedding one of her teeth in the gunwale her second week aboard and demanding that she sail with the crew until the _Morrígan_ furnished her with a proper replacement.

Johnson was plenty trustworthy. Perhaps moreso than Gist, who tended to turn a blind eye to the inessentials simply because he wanted to get ashore sooner, every thirsty. Not this afternoon: Haytham had insisted we both go to meet his contact before he separated us to his instructions in London. Gist was stuck playing the role of Templar Knight and looking the part, something he rarely did.

The cab which had taken Haytham returned but was forced to idle at length until when we were saying our farewells and promising to return to grant shore leave, and we went to it together, climbing into the hansom and shutting the door behind us. Gist, at his complete ease anywhere he could reasonably take a nap, instantly stretched his long legs out as far as he could in the interior, his knees pressed to the bench I sat on opposite him, his hat tilted halfway down over his face.

“I thought you wanted to see London,” I said, glancing out the carriage windows as we began to move. He made a noncommittal noise in response, did not otherwise move. He appeared to have no interest in becoming more attentive.

“Properly. Ideally, not sober while I do it. You can never really get the measure of a place before you stumble round the streets drunk as hell waiting to be fleeced. A carriage ride teaches you nothing of the character of a place. Just of the character of the carriage.”

“I’ll be, Christopher. You’re sounding right philosophical now.”

“In vino veritas,” he replied, lifting an imaginary cup in a toast. “No one philosophizes like the drunk, Shay. We’re just usually wrong.”

 

 

The route the carriage took quickly lost me, too little visible out the window for too short an interval for me to get any real grasp of where within the city we were. My father had stopped here once when I had sailed with him, and he had taken me ashore with him, but we had not ventured far from the docks. In the years since my memories had grown hazy and dim, so I could not rely on even the slightest information in them. Whatever time we stayed in London I would have to rely on my own instincts and whatever helpful urban guide went alongside us.

Eventually, though, the hansom halted, and the driver stepped down from his seat, came to open our door. “We have arrived at Queen Anne’s Square,” he told us.

What a sight we must have made: me, sitting with my hands folded between my knees, bristling with more weaponry than the man had ever likely seen on someone, faintly vibrating with anticipation, and Gist, asleep with his hat over his mouth.

He took it in stride. Before he could outright request we kindly exit his vehicle, I shook Christopher's knee to wake him and climbed down to the street level below, glancing back as he joined me, straightening his hat. The house we had been left in front of was a handsome one: it was set back slightly from the street by a small but prim front garden, mostly given over to crop-producing varieties of shrubbery rather than anything purely decorative. So there was at least _some_ sensibility to the estate owner.

There was a driveway, which we had been placed in by the hansom, and it led to a house that my immediate reaction to was _a mansion—_ four storeys, entirely brick with white wood and shutters framing the pane glass windows, the driveway we had been left off at connected to a paved walkway that entered the courtyard, leading past a decorative fountain to the front door. The gate before the manor was open, but it was no purely decorative affair: the fence and gate were both tall enough and without easy enough handholds that nobody save someone who had truly mastered the skill of climbing would be able to easy scale them. The top of the gate and wrought-iron fence were both covered with spikes that I could see did appear to be genuinely sharp: they were no decorative deterrent.

Someone valued safety.

Gist led the way down the walkway, not reeling as I was before the force of my own inexperience with wealth, and I followed him quickly, hurrying my steps to catch his. It was a mansion yes, but I could see that it was slightly dilapidated: it was growing significant patches of ivy, and not every window was lit by a candle. Some had their shutters fully closed, hiding incomplete pane glass, and some rooms were very dark. There was visible decay in the garden, as well, but it had been beaten back recently, and new growth was thickening the verdure.

All I had to do to not be awed was remind myself of the anguish of poverty and squalor that I had grown up in after my father’s death, where begging for a scrap of bread was a good day and going to bed hungry but for snow was a bad one. Compare my own experiences, rely on my good sense.

It was one thing to _remember_ that Haytham Kenway came from a king’s ransom of money his father had made as a famous, successful pirate. It was money that his son had invested well—Haytham owned a successful farm in Virginia, and made plenty through the efforts of the Templar Fleet, the same sources of land investment and shipping I had begun to make a fortune from. It was another thing entirely to see the people he associated with in London, the families whose acquaintances he had made and nurtured over years. And here we were, seeing the world he’d left behind to come to live in the Colonies, sleeping half the time out of inn rooms.

I often forgot I _had_ a fortune, now. There was no need for me to be a miser, re-using clothes until they fell apart, melting candles back into shape from their leavings rather than buying new ones. It was hard to remember that being a Templar came with certain perks; becoming rich as Croesus was just one of them.

Haytham had never shared just how much wealth he was sitting on, but I knew it was enough that he felt no pressures on his personal purse from bailing Charles out of his frequent debts, incurred in the most intense of his episodes of mania that made him so wildly extravagant. Even still, seeing spaces considered to be his equal in London was...surprising. The little boy who learned to do acrobatics for coins on streetcorners and the man who worried that his crushed red velvet tailcoat with gold thread embroidery would be fit enough for respectable company were two very different men.

We were met at the front door by a liveried butler. Christopher doffed his hat when he got to the doorway and briefly introduced us to the man, who had, within moments, confiscated his hat with an offer to hang it for him. “Sir Haytham and Lady Scott await you in the pink drawing room,” he explained, turning sharply. “Please follow me.” The man’s steps went quickly upstairs, and we followed him past the wide open stairwell to an interior hallway, and then up a smaller flight of stairs to the third floor, around another narrow hallway over the open atrium, to a side door that was left open. Our guide stopped in the door, Gist’s hat held behind his back, and announced us before he left the way we had come.

The room I stepped into was not opulent, at least by the definitions I had come to know met that term: it was much more like the decoration Haytham had done to Fort Arsenal, but more restrained in its color scheme. The walls were papered in a very faint powder pink pattern, and the furniture was all of a similar color, with silver and gold as accents. Haytham rose when we stepped inside, coming to show Gist to a chair and taking me to join him on the couch he had been sitting on before we had arrived. “I had begun to worry something was keeping you,” he said, his brow lowered. “Did you have some difficulty with the harbormaster?”

“He had a hard time believing we were just carrying ballast. Had to do an inspection.” Before Haytham could drag me to sit down, I turned to his companion, who had risen to meet me. “No trouble; just time consuming.” I paused, looking at her, and then affected my best bow, picked up her proffered hand and kissed the back of her fingers. “Madam. Forgive me for not greeting you immediately.”

“Polite!” Her voice carried a tone of mock surprise. “Certainly better than this other ruffian, and less stubborn with his manners than you are, Haytham.” I pulled back from her hand to get a better look at her, surprised to hear her speaking so directly to him—she had to know him quite well if she was using his Christian name so flippantly in company.

I replied, “I’ve not had the privilege of an introduction to you, or I should try to be even more polite.” Her mouth shifted into a wry half-smile tucked into her cheek, an expression I had come to know well on Haytham, and I was possessed by a sudden theory, an expectation that I could not immediately prove, but I was instantly suspicious of.

Indeed, a moment later, she confirmed my suspicion: “I should so wish to be horrified that my brother failed to alert you to our forthcoming introduction, but it certainly is something of the sort he would do.” She let my hand go and lifted one side of her skirt in an almost-curtsy. A sister—Haytham had a sister, whom he had previously neglected to mention completely. “I am Jennifer Scott; Haytham’s older sister. You must be Captain Cormac.” I nodded, and she turned to Christopher, who mock-doffed his hat. “And you the infamous Christopher Gist, dried out temporarily to decorate my best rocking chair.”

Gist still didn’t stand, and I could see Lady Scott’s face as she took the measure of him; it reminded me much of the way I’d reacted upon meeting him. There was something irresistible about his attitude. It was hard to avoid the instantaneous attraction. “One and the same, m’lady. You certainly are a woman worth crossing the ocean for, if you don’t mind my saying so. If Master Kenway had mentioned he had a sister as fetching as you sooner, I would have been flying to your side on wings of canvas. Is it too much to hope that Scott isn’t a married name?”

“Indeed it is not, I bear my mother’s last name—Haytham and I are half-siblings. You will find, however, that I am as hard a bargainer when it comes to potential matches as any husband would be on the matter of adultery.” Lady Scott smoothed her skirts and gestured to the couch beside Haytham. “Please, Captain Cormac, have a seat.” At last allowed to by propriety (George had at least drilled _some_ manners into my head before Christopher had arrived to ruin them) I sat beside Haytham and took a moment to examine our hostess.

Their relation was obvious to me immediately: especially sitting across from one another as they were, Haytham and his sister shared numerous features. She had his same sable head of hair, although hers fell in waves that were left tantalizingly loose despite her relative rank (perhaps as a reminder of her unmarried status), streaked through with silver that only made her look more severe and unreachable. She wore little paint upon her face, only some slight tint to her lips and eyelids, and it made her long, strong-jawed face unusually pugnacious in its contrast. Instead of becoming more ladylike, her paint only made her look more mutinous. She and Haytham shared an identical nose—which meant it was likely a Kenway trait—but she had brown eyes, rounder cheekbones and a thicker neck, with a heavier brow and a distinct widow’s peak.

What struck me as most alike between them, though, was how she was dressed. Miss Scott was wearing a cotton dress with a muslin top layer, and at first glance it seemed to be picked in deference to fashion and mores—but as I looked closer, I realized that was certainly not the case. It was an earthy brown dye, not fashion by a stretch, beneath a house-apron that was patterned, and it did not appear to be struggling over anything as restrictive as too many petticoats.

No, where she was sitting, her skirt lifted just high enough from her unusually masculine body language, her knees squarely above her feet, I could see that the hems had ridden up to reveal sensible boots and what appeared to be trousers worn beneath her dress. Much like the Kenway whom I was most used to, his sister seemed far more preoccupied with being able to properly do things of import than of societal matters where it was possible for her to get away with it. They shared their handsome heads of hair and their demands for function before appearance.

Finishing off her own cup of tea, she continued, “I had intended to offer you both tea, but due to your delay it is nearly supper, so I shall refrain. Haytham was beginning to worry we would have to eat without you if you did not arrive posthaste.” She shot her brother a look, and he glared back at her with a jovial humor I hadn’t expected from him. Haytham had never struck me as a man frequently given to petty sibling disputes.

Then again, he’d not struck me as a man with a sibling. If she was his sister, too, there was a high likelihood that this was the family manor—a thought that gave me another of those twinges of inadequacy. Next to this, I was as out of place as a fox amongst the sheep.

“Sir, how long have you had a beautiful sister tucked away and I’ve not known about her?” Gist asked, already mooning over Jennifer. He didn’t even glance at Haytham as he spoke, instead grinning directly at Lady Scott. “You should have introduced us years ago.”

“There’s scarce been time,” Haytham mumbled, and Lady Scott glanced to Gist with a measuring look.

“I have only been in London for slightly under two years, Master Gist, so you must accept my apologies. There has been little time for me to be deeply invested in looking into matters of the heart—and even should I be in lust of some biblical companionship, I would be looking for someone with less beard than you currently sport. I am afraid the masculine has never drawn my desire.”

Gist grinned at her undiminished despite her clear rebuke. “Then I’ll start with helping to reform your opinion of the good name of men, and try from there.” Haytham choked next to me, although what was funny I was not privy to. “A woman with a tongue like yours certainly should have it complimented upon its fine work. Ideally at length. After a demonstration.”

I had expected her to chastise him. I certainly was close to it myself—if I had been seated near enough to him, I would have stepped hard on his toes. Instead, Miss Scott threw back her head and laughed.

She turned toward her brother, her face broken by an undisguised look of mirth. She shook her head at him. “Haytham, where _do_ you find them?”

“I don’t,” he corrected. “Usually, as is the way of these things when it comes to being adopted by strays, they find me, and I merely provide them food at reasonable stretches of time and see if I can hold their interest with diversions. And then, having successfully worn a hole in my defenses, they stay. Forever.” He shot me a look, and I arched one brow back at him in an imitation of one of his favorite expressions.

Miss Scott rose, setting her teacup aside. “Supper shall, I believe, prove to be a delightful meal, full of witty distractions. Therefore, I prose we eat before it gets cold. Captain Cormac, Master Gist, please, follow me.” With that, Miss Scott gestured us after her, and led the way out of the drawing room and once more into the winding hallways of the mansion, her long stride and firm footsteps eating up ground at a rate fast enough that I quickly revised my opinion of her.

No: the trait Jennifer Scott shared most with her brother was the fact that she walked like she was on her way to commit a murder.

 

 

Miss Scott proved to be a skilled conversationalist. I sat back at supper and let Gist and the siblings do most of the talking, as all three of them loved most the sounds of their own voices, while I continued to take stock of our situation and make assumptions as to what would be awaiting us at the end of the meal we were served. It was clearly no unusually extravagant meal, as it was treated as precisely the usual affair by the staff, but it was still three courses, followed by a dessert course of baklava, which I enjoyed with relish. “Forgive me my unusual tastes; I spent some many years in the Orient,” Lady Scott explained when Gist expressed surprise and confusion over the sweet. “It was not an experience best given to discussion at the table, but it has left me with tastes London does not always cater to.”

Christopher replied by lasciviously sucking his fingers clean, and I just put my face in my hands. “Christopher,” I tried, my voice cracking. “ _Must_ you?”

Lady Scott waved away my dissatisfaction. “It’s delightful; he really thinks he has some vain hope of succeeding in a sally against my affections. Please, Master Gist, do continue.”

“Pray, do _not_ continue,” Haytham interrupted, carrying a small silver tray with a crystal decanter and glasses from the sideboard to the table where we sat around our empty plates; he poured a finger for all of us and passed them around. A cursory sniff revealed it to be a rich port, and Gist got a look on his face that could only belong to an alcoholic sampling the finest of the virtues proffered by his greatest vice. “And do not partake too deeply of that,” Haytham cautioned, as Gist took a swig. “Not because I care if you drink the whole bottle, I’m certain you swindling all of Reginald’s carefully collected stores is precisely the sort of thing both Jenny and I would like to see done with it, but because I have need of your wits.”

“What little of them there are,” I muttered around my cup, and Gist mock-bowed to me.

Haytham had returned to his seat as he spoke, and the servants came to clear the table between us. One of them brought a tube that she handed to Lady Scott, who opened it and pulled out a map, which she unrolled and lay atop the table, using the decanter to hold one end flat and placing the plate of baklava atop the opposing corner, precisely within my reach, and I happily pulled another chunk free, ate it as I leaned over the map.

It was a map of the eastern coast of the island of England, stretching up to Scotland. “Captain Cormac, I am assuming you see no issue with Master Gist taking the _Morrígan_ on an errand of import during our business here?” Haytham asked me, glancing up from beneath his brows. I shrugged; that was his job, after all. “Good. I know that shore leave is a necessity, as well as properly provisioning her, but as soon as it may be effected I need you to set sail for Dysart.” Haytham pulled his spectacles from a pocket, set them atop his nose, leaned over the map to point to the town. “John Pitcairn lives there—you did not meet him when he was in the Colonies during the earliest part of the War, as you were engaged with the Colonel during his time as part of the Southern Department. I need you to fetch John and bring him back to London.”

“Does he know we’re coming, or is this the surprise kind of a fetching,” Gist replied, and I could hear the danger in his voice—that intentional obfuscation receded, revealed his intelligence and savvy. “Because one will take longer than the other.”

“The former,” Haytham clarified, returning his spectacles to his pocket once more. “I dispatched a message for him before I left the docks, and he will have it before you arrive. He remains loyal to our cause, and I have great need of his assistance with several small matters.” As he spoke, Christopher peered carefully at the map, one eye shut and the other squinted as he marked down where it was he would be going. “There is no need to rush the crew. We will need to be in London some weeks at the least; our removal shall not be effected with anywhere near so much alacrity as our arrival.”

“Better get it done faster than sooner. Pardon my restless nature, Lady Scott, but I’m not suited for salons and parlors.” Gist tossed back the rest of his port and rose, sketching Lady Scott the least believable bow I’d ever seen from anyone, ever. “I’m afraid I will have to leave you far less interesting company in the form of my Captain. I’d best get back to our ship and get her ready to sail.” He shook Haytham’s hand, kissed my cheek, and left the dining room, calling he would find his own way out just as soon as he found his hat.

In the wake of his abrupt exit, Lady Scott let out a sigh. “Is he always like this?” She asked, turning to Haytham, who was playing with his now-empty glass, a curious expression on his face.

“Aye,” I answered, in lieu of Haytham, who seemed to not be listening in the slightest. “Worse, usually. Master Kenway has had him drying out for the last three days, or else he’d be...” I gave her a look, and she seemed to understand my meaning. “He’s a very...hotheaded person, same as I, Madam. But you can rest assured he knows what he’s doing.”

“Oh, that was never of any worry to me.” Lady Scott poured herself a second measure of port, and then one for me as well. “Say whatever else you wish to of the vagaries of the Order and all their myriad failures and less complimentary qualities, but those among your Rites do certainly have a knack for finding agents who can complete their tasks with the greatest displays of skill.” She turned her gaze on me, and I found myself quailing beneath the look she tendered on me then.

It was not a kindly look. It was a cutting glance, as if she could slice me into easily identifiable pieces and learn how I ticked. It was the look of a woman who knew how to size men up and then cast them aside just as quickly as soon as they failed to reach her expectations. It was the look of a woman who had made her space in the world through force, and was unafraid to do it again.

It was the look Haytham had given me the day I had joined the Southern Department Rite. It was a look that broke no compromise.

“You know why you are here,” she said, and I nodded mutely in confirmation. She gave a jerk of her head, agreeing with me. “Then there is a great deal I must explain to you upon the morrow, but you are no doubt exhausted and in need of proper rest. Your crossing was made with the greatest haste, and it cannot have been easy in your position. I hope you will not find yourself deeply discomfited should I ask you share bunkings with my brother; I am loathe to air out a second guest room.”

“Ah, no,” I tried to force myself to stop the smile that took my face at her implication, but it was hardly successful. “Certainly not, Madam. May I ask how you knew we would be amenable…?”

“That,” Lady Scott said, standing and finishing her port, “Is a question for my brother, Captain Cormac, not me.” I looked to Haytham, and found him staring down at his empty glass, and he seemed almost _castigated_ by her words. “I have another entry upon my calendar for late this evening, and I beg your pardons for my abrupt exit, but I must be off now to make it in a timely fashion. Haytham, Captain Cormac, until tomorrow.” She curtsied, and I stood and reflexively bowed to her again as she took up her skirts in one hand and went to the doorway out of the dining room.

It was there she paused, her form silhouetted by the candles in the hall. “Haytham?” He glanced up immediately when she spoke, and his face was raw _—frightened_. “I have found that the easiest way to tell a painful truth is to do so as quickly and simply as possible. The sooner the better. Goodnight, gentlemen.”

And with that, she left us, me standing and Haytham looking terrified by whatever implication she had turned upon him as his own personal sword of Damocles, in a silence thick enough it could have cracked like frost in a cold snap upon a windowpane.


	5. ACT III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Start at the beginning? Or, if it’s easier, you can just...tell me the worst, and work backwards.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tws for this chapter:  
> \- fairly oblique discussion of the reginald/jim/jenny stuff  
> \- brief mentions of misgendering

ACT III:  
 _the ides of march are come._

 

Left alone, neither of us spoke. I wanted to go to Haytham—to ask for an explanation—but there was something about the way he held his shoulders and the tension in his jaw that made me hold back. “Can I do anything?” I asked at last, and he hesitated, still rolling the glass he held in his hands.

“Go to the wine cellar for me, please. Get whatever the most expensive thing you can find.” He waved a dismissive hand and, letting him to his sulking, I went to go find someone to help me out. In the end it was the same liveried footman who had met Gist and I at the door, and I followed him down the servant’s stair to the cellar, holding the lantern as he searched for Haytham’s ‘most expensive’ bottle. In the end, he selected something with a label in German, and passed it to me.

It was a very old bottle, dusty, and I carried it carefully back up to the main house. When Haytham proved to have vacated the now-empty dining room, I was shown to his room, where he met me at the door.

He had changed back into his usual coat and cloak, traded his breeches for trousers with more give around the seams. I held out the bottle for him to inspect, and he held it at arm’s length in lieu of fishing out his spectacles as he glanced at the label, then raised his eyebrows. “I hadn’t the slightest idea we had that,” he murmured, tucking it into a bag he had produced from somewhere and tied it to the belt round his waist. “Are you warm enough in that coat to join me for an evening constitutional?” He asked, folding his hands behind his back, and I shrugged. “It may be a bit windy—“

“My trunks here?” I asked, and he gestured me into his room. Stepping past him in the open doorway, I found the room we were to be sharing to be rather against my expectations. It was not the bedroom of the man of the house, which near stopped me in my tracks. It was smaller, less elaborate in its decoration than I had expected, and his bed was a relatively narrow one. His coat and waistcoat from earlier hung from the door of the dresser, and he had already begun to toss his things haphazardly about. The room seemed to have been kept in a near-pristine condition in his absence, but that sort of thing would never stand up to Haytham Kenway’s usual manner of destruction, so recently vented against my own cabin: there were books, three inkwells, two quills, a stack of paper, and a blotter on the desk already; not to mention about eight different knives on the bedspread.

At least he was predictable.

My trunks were in a corner, and I went to to them, opening both as I searched for my greatcoat. It was an older one—I had taken it from the Colonel’s things after his death—and was a little small on me, as I had topped him out by a good few inches, but I treasured it nevertheless. It was plenty warm for the time of year, so I pulled it on and returned to Haytham’s side.

We left the house on foot, and I trusted in Haytham’s sense of direction to lead me about the city safely, keeping pace beside him. He always walked slightly faster than I did, but on this night his steps were unusually slow, as if he was unsure he wished to reach our destination, looking for some excuse and finding it in the form of his own legs. I took the time afforded me by his meandering to look about the city, to try and learn from it. “London’s beautiful,” I said, when we reached the riverside and we stopped for a moment in a circle of yellow light cast by a lamp. Haytham leaned against the post as we watched the water.

“Compared to New York?” I looked back at him, grinned.

“You know I’d never betray her like that.” That, and, though I’d been born in New York, I was still Irish. I had a responsibility to my family, to the homeland that still called me to its open shores, to not be _too_ kindly to the Empire that had so recently tried to burn us all out. His lips quirked just slightly, but he did not glance at my face, still staring out over the river. “Do you like it here?”

“Truthfully, I’ve very little attachment to it.” I tilted my head, watching him closely. There was something to his face, some distance that made it unusually hard to read. He was a man not given to projecting his thoughts in his manners of standing and expression, his very tone kept guarded, but tonight it was as if he had thrown up a wall between us. I almost felt like it was our first meeting all over again. I could not read him in the slightest; it was like trying to see the future in mud.

He didn’t want me too close. There was something he didn’t want me to see.

“But you grew up here,” I prompted, when it seemed he would speak no further, and he let out a short breath. “You were _born_ here,” I corrected, trying again to part the curtains he had drawn so tight about his soul. It was one of the first things I had noticed about him: compared to every other member of the Southern Department Rite, Haytham oozed gentry with every step. Charles often forgot to put his on, his mania dispelling it into obsession and his depression covering it in disaffection, and George had been well-respected, but from a lesser background. Haytham was cut from the cloth of London, born and bred to it, even if he was a first-generation climber of such a rank.

“Yes, I was. You’ve seen the very spot, although not the same house. The manor now is more recent; my mother had it rebuilt. But I myself have spent very little time in and around London.” He turned at last to look at me, and I had to keep my hands folded in my swordbelt to refrain from reaching for him at that moment. I desperately wanted to take his hand, for a look of such sorrow upon his face pricked me like a thorn. I had never seen his eyes so haunted. “I grew up on the Continent. The precious little time I have spent in London has always been in pursuit of some greater purpose, and most of it for mere days.” He pursed his lips. “Until Jenny and I were here, before I returned to the Colonies. I was forced, I admit, to a period of convalescence of some months. We were here from January until nearly June.” I gave a low whistle.

“Your side, then?” He nodded curtly. “Is that what this is about?”

“Yes, some of it.” Haytham admitted, almost ashamed of it. “But not here. A little further; this is not a matter spoken of where prying ears could be eavesdropping.” We walked on, and despite his professed lack of familiarity with the city, Haytham pointed out major sights to me that we saw, gesturing up to the skyline. He never could resist showing off. At last, his steps slowed, and I looked past him to the base of the building before us, and let out a slow breath.

“Is this legal?” I asked, not looking at him. He hummed noncommittally, his hands folded behind his back.

“Certainly not, but I’ve yet to climb it, and I should like no-one better by my side. Charles is a poor match for my speed, and I should think he would...disparage such a sacrilegious pastime. Will you join me?” One of the things Haytham most often touted was my skill and speed at climbing as compared to his, enhanced by my time with the Oneida and Kesegowaase’s training, not to mention a childhood spent clambering over rigging, but he shone in the urban environment. There was _nothing_ in the Colonies like the churches of Europe, and my own experience with them was limited, at best.

“Sure,” I said, following him as he hopped up onto the raised front of the building. “I may be a bit slow.”

“No slower than me and my side. Come along, Shay. Let’s see what a view London can present us.”

 

 

In the end, we both needed help. Haytham couldn’t stretch quite well enough for a few jumps and required a boost, and I was unused to the handholds and needed a pull, but we eventually got to the top of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, and we sat together on the peak of the dome, beneath the cross above our heads, our feet dangling out into space. London from above was beautiful—the sheer size of the city almost numbing. It didn’t look quite so big from down below, where the warren of streets belied the confluence of the environment, but from up above I could hardly comprehend it. As we settled down, making ourselves comfortable, Haytham took off his cloak and moved closer to me until our sides were pressed together from shoulder to ankle, and I shook off my coat and hung it over his shoulders as well, to share and share alike.

The cross proved a somewhat effective windbreak, but it was a chilly night, and up this high the gusts were impressive, enough to cut straight through you.

Taking out the wine bottle, Haytham stuck his hidden blade into the cork to twist it free, pulling it out that way and handing me the bottle as he removed the cork from his blade and tossed it haphazardly into the darkness, smiling to himself. “That will confuse some poor passerby, I am sure. How is the wine?” I shrugged, took a sip.

“Tastes like wine. What is it?”

“If I’m remembering my sommelier training, however brief it was some few years ago, I believe that goes for several hundred pounds a bottle at the least.” I stared at the bottle and then stared at him, found him giving me his wry half-smile. “I had no idea that we had inherited a bottle of it.”

I hesitated, my unfamiliarity with proper etiquette forcing me to reconsider our position. “Should we really be drinking it up here like a couple of boys skiving off from lessons?”

“Oh, absolutely. Give it here.” His voice dripped with relish near to excitement—which was strange, as Haytham was a well-known lightweight—but I passed it to him, and he tilted took a swig, holding his hat on his head as he did so so it wouldn’t blow away. “You...were not wrong,” he said, looking at it. “Certainly tastes like wine. I find it humbling to admit, but I’ve never been able to tell a damn lick of difference. It’s all grapes to me.”

I stared at him, and then burst out laughing. “Imagine Gist if he heard us now! He’d be so angry.” Haytham’s stoic mask cracked, and he snorted.

“Indeed; I think we’d drive the poor man to apoplexy. I should have given him this bottle as a gift for his going back out to sea, rather than us drinking it up here.” He passed it back to me, and I took another swing. It made me feel startlingly young again, like I was still on the streets, sneaking out with bottles from taverns and drinking myself giddy on walls down by the wharves—or that it was my first few years in the Brotherhood, when Liam and I would wander off after assignments, find something to do with the best of early evenings. Only instead I was on one of the most famous buildings in the world, with a man I adored, my boyhood haunts left behind and my boyhood companions buried in the earth and their memories haunting my soul, drinking a bottle of wine that probably cost more than any single object I’d owned in my life bar my ship. “Let’s just never tell him.” I held the bottle between my thighs when he didn’t reach for it, and we looked out over the city together. It was surprisingly intimate for how exposed we were, and I could look down and see tiny shadows passing beneath the yellow circles of the streetlights.

Nobody knew we were up here; in the darkness, nobody could have seen us, unless they had Haytham’s incredibly keen vision for distance, and perhaps not even then. We were, for all intents and purposes, alone in the world.

“I’ve always wanted to come up here,” Haytham whispered, his hands folded and pressed between his knees, his gaze distant as he stared out over the cityscape and the far skyline. “Ever since I was a child. You can see the tip of the steeple from the window in the library at the manor, and I would stare at it at my lessons, wonder what it was like up here. How far you could see.”

“So why didn’t you sooner?”

“Never had the time.” I leaned into his shoulder when he went silent again, attempting to give him something to strengthen his resolve.

“What is it Jenny wants you to tell me?” Haytham shrugged just enough that I felt it. “Pardon my saying it, Sir, but it’s pulled that stick out your ass and turned it sideways.” He huffed a quiet sigh at me in remonstration, but didn’t deny it.

“That would be because Jenny is the only person now living who knows what it is she wants me to tell you.” I froze, the bottle halfway to my lips, and stared at him. “But she is correct. You have a right to know; I cannot in good conscience ask you to undertake such a burden as we came here to pursue without telling you the truth of what it is I helped precipitate, for the present state of the War is...in no small way my fault.”

“Start at the beginning?” I offered, and then, hesitated—thought back to when I had told him of my own experiences, in Lisbon. I hadn’t started at the beginning then. I had just started at the end. At the hardest part. “Or, if it’s easier, you can just...tell me the worst, and work backwards.”

“It has some merit,” He nodded, still thinking it over, and he rubbed his chin, shifted, our shoulders brushing. “I killed Reginald Birch.” The way he said it, his voice was deep and heavy, as if imparting upon me a burden greater that that which stooped the shoulders of Atlas, and when I did not react, he looked back to me, a questioning expression on his face. It had clearly been meant to engender in me some shocked revelation, and I gave him a look.

“Hayth, the only Templars I’ve ever met are the Southern Department.” I flexed my hand, shot out my hidden blade. “Remember?”

Haytham was not a man given to displays of emotion, but even then, his cheeks colored and he cleared his throat, looked away from me awkwardly. “Ah,” he said. “Of course. I had—well, perhaps forgotten is the wrong word for it, but you know how these things are, when it comes to old wounds, pain grown so weary you can forget it did not always belong to you. It can...slip the mind, when such an agony has taken your entire life in its grasp. It becomes hard to separate your ghosts from the rest of the world.” I set my hand atop his wrist, squeezed, my thumb pressed to the hollow beneath his. “Reginald Birch was my mentor—a father figure, you could say. Something like what the late Colonel Monro was to you, albeit not a relationship of equals. Reginald _raised_ me: he oversaw every aspect of my life from the time I was ten until I went to the Colonies in ‘54. Between those two, my life revolved around him, he was my lodestone, the North Star by which I charted my course home. It is...hard, I admit, to categorize our relationship. When I was a boy he was my instructor at all my lessons, the originator of near all my skills; when I was a young man, he was my first lover. When I grew older, Reginald was but one aspect of that which I shaped myself to become. And now, he is...I am not sure what.”

Haytham went quiet, and then, “ _Vulpis et Aquila_. The fable. Are you familiar?”

“You’ll need to give me the English there, mate. I’ve not your head for languages.”

“My apologies.” Haytham always murmured it like he was trying to swallow it, but the rarity with which he cried pardon did give it far greater import and meaning than if it had been as frequent as many other men used it. “The Fox and the Eagle—it is one of Aesop’s fables; collected from the _Phaedrus_. An eagle and a fox become friends, and yet despite this when the eagle needs to feed its young, it steals the fox’s kits, and the eaglets feast. A terrible fire roasts the eaglets in the nest, and the fox feasts upon them. An eye for an eye, if you will. Do not trust those who would eat your young near the nest, no matter how kindly their friendship.” In his voice there remained yet a note of mocking humor, self-remonstration, although I could not in truth tell why. “You know who my father was.”

I snorted. “It’d be hard not to. Man’s an Assassin hero. I couldn’t tell you the times that I heard Liam...” I trailed off, and felt my chest tighten. Liam, dead not even a full year, and yet his ghost haunted me as if he had passed just yesterday, watching over my shoulder and demanding restitution for all I had done to him. I swallowed, cleared my throat. Now was _not_ the time for my old hurts to surface; Haytham and Gist had already suffered long nights listening to me rail against the wiles of fate and, upon the occasion, get blind drunk and cry myself sick. No doubt I would again, before our errand here was over, but not when Haytham was in the act of unburdening his agonies to me. “Tell and retell stories of his high-seas adventures. Liam practically worshipped him. When Adéwalé came to the Homestead Liam spent half the time he was there _begging_ for stories about Edward Kenway.” I glanced at Haytham; found him watching me in turn. “You know he was Mentor. In the British Brotherhood.”

He shook his head. “I...had no idea that his memory was...so well-revered.” Haytham’s father had been one of the two British Mentors. Haytham had killed Miko, the other. Such a strange dichotomy between them. He continued. “Truthfully, I hardly knew my father. He died when I was ten. Upon my birthday, in fact, or near enough that it hardly matters. You see, when he returned to London, he needed to hire a property manager, in part to oversee the upkeep of my sister’s dowry from her mother, and a man of about his own age was recommended to him by an acquaintance. That man was Reginald Birch, and they were fast friends, equal in disposition and manner, of a similar self-made rank that left them rather on the outs with the élite, unable to _fit_ in proper society.

“Reginald swore to me, years later, that it was, truly, an accident. He really had just been looking for new clients, and he was _quite_ good at his job. But Reginald, at the time my father took him on, was a Master Templar, one who had been tasked to obtain a journal that his fellows believed held a wealth of information on Precursor sites.”

“Edward had the journal,” I surmised. Haytham nodded.

“I can only guess as to when Reginald realized my father was the same Edward Kenway as had caused that fiasco in the West Indies, but he, to his credit, did _try_ to get the journal by less invasive means than he might have tried against someone who he did not care for with true intimacy. He tried first via friendship, asking after my father’s secretive adventures before he had come to London, and when that bore no fruit, courted Jenny’s affections to wed her. When that, too, proved to be a futile exercise, he used me as callously as men of our sorts are ought, discovered the information he needed, and sprung the trap.”

“He killed your father,” I said, and Haytham nodded. “And your mother?” He shook his head. She must have died later, then. “What happened to you and Jenny?”

“Jenny was kidnapped and torn from the house before any of us could go after her. To my shame, I hardly thought of her in the years to come except as a potential variable within the greater scope of my revenge. She is twelve years older than I, and we were very distant when I was a young—she had lived with her mother for most of her childhood, and resented her step-mother. She was stifled by my father. He had loved her mother terribly, and when he learned of her death it devastated him. He tried to protect her, and in so doing, came to control her entire life. He never taught her any of the skills he imparted to me, and she chafed at the bit. Jenny has always been, and remains, devoted to the cause of the Assassins with a zeal they should have been glad for, if they had ever given her but the opportunity to shine.

“I,” Haytham took a deep breath, and reached for the bottle, which I passed him. He took a long drink to wet his throat before he continued, “Was left in Reginald’s care. My mother never recovered from seeing my father die, and could do nothing for me from that day on. So Reginald trained me, molded me, raised me, instructed and taught me and _formed_ me into that which he needed most. I became his greatest weapon, his ultimate asset, and I trusted in him implicitly, loved him nearly as much as I had once loved my father. Until my mother’s death.”

The story he told me then showed me once again the depths to which both Templar and Assassin were willing to sink to in pursuit of their professed ideals. It was nothing new to me—I had seen, and been complicit in, plenty of similar heinous acts. But the horror to me was that it had been played out atop Haytham’s shoulders, and he in his loneliness had been forced to bear it alone. When I had fallen from the nest, abandoned by the Assassins in demands to my conscience, I had found George waiting for me. I had known, then and now, that he had been lulling me into trusting him, but I had made the choice to enter into his fraternity. There had been very little convincing. He had given me a family, helped me find a world where I was treated with respect and care.

Hell, even within the Brotherhood, Liam had always been in my corner, and Hope—well. We had never recovered from our first, and greatest, break. She had never been able to really _accept_ what I was, not out of hate but out of love, for the woman I had been when she had first set eyes on me was one who she held in dearest regard. She’d never been able to let it go.

They had been my family, aye. Not a happy or a healthy one, but a _family_. Now the men with whom I shared my present and future were even greater in my estimation than any of the many I had known, but Haytham had not had them; he had existed in a stasis of fortitude based entirely on the predication of his remaining, by force, without recourse of allies. He had not existed within a Rite, tied to a community, to those who valued him and who he valued in turn.

He had been a weapon. A talented, but lonely, weapon. Made to kill, and kill, and kill again, without ever being wiped down, until it had shattered his steel and worn him to rust.

As he spoke, the world that had shaped Haytham took shape before me, casting light to shadows that had cloaked him since the day we had first met, answering questions I had mulled and reminisced on for years—pursuing the supposed traitors and mercenaries who had killed his father, his forced service in the War of the Austrian Succession and the atrocities he committed in Edward Braddock’s name, his relationship with Jim Holden (who he spoke of with the greatest care and affection), and, eventually, their rescue of Jenny from the Ottoman Empire, Jim’s disfigurement, Reginald’s murder, and the subsequent injury Haytham had taken, culminating in Jim’s death.

In the length of his telling, Haytham had emptied the bottle, and when he was at last done we sat in silence in the monumental quietude that echoed afterward. Beneath us, the bells of St. Paul’s tolled, chiming midnight.

It had begun to drizzle, so we had retreated under the relative shade afforded by the cross, my greatcoat pulled up over our heads to keep dry. True night had brought with it sharper winds and a greater chill, so I was glad for Haytham’s warmth now just as I had been in the North Atlantic, and as we sat in silence, mulling over his words, he turned the now-empty bottle back and forth between his hands, trying to ease some of the nervous energy that animated him so now that he had unburdened himself to me.

He was quite tipsy, so I wasn’t surprised when he held the bottle up by its neck and turned one arched brow upon me. “Shall I toss it?” I looked at him; I expected better. He was supposed to be the _sensible_ one. “What?”

“Just—out of the sky? You could kill someone.”

“I could call a warning.”

“ _Hayth._ ”

“Oh, be reasonable,” he chided me, somehow managing to sound censorious with every word despite his clear state of dishabille. “When will you have another opportunity like this? Atop one of the tallest buildings in the world, with an empty bottle of wine worth a fortune. Let’s cause a little chaos.” I continued to look at him reprovingly, and he squared his shoulders, trying to puff himself up like a cat, as if some absurd mock-manhood example could force me to stop judging him. “I am allowed to be foolish upon the rare occasion, Master Cormac.”

“Aye,” I said, not letting anything of the humor I found in his manner into my voice, “I suppose you had no real chance for it as a lad, when the _rest_ of us were off being as empty-headed as a couple of scarecrows.” He almost looked _pleading_. I had never seen him pout, but this was like as not to be the closest I would ever get.

I pressed my hands over my eyes.

“Oh, if you must,” I murmured at last, and he leaned forward, over the edge of the cupola, and cupped his hand round his mouth. I grabbed the back of his collar reflexively, not trusting him in his present state of inebriation to not topple over the edge.

“Look out down there!” Haytham called, yelling as loud as he could, and then he threw the empty bottle overhand down into the nearly-vacant street below. I leaned forward with him to watch its slow arcing descent that ended in a _spectacular_ shattering upon the cobblestones below. Both of us almost immediately burst out laughing, and I hauled Haytham backwards over the edge and out of sight as several people came running, stifling our laughter with one hand over my mouth and the other over his as we both wheezed, collapsed together. Nobody could have heard us, certainly, but something of the manner of the night made me want to hide our gaiety, to keep it as secret between us as the matters he had just divulged.

In the absurdity of the moment the pressure of his revelation had lessened slightly. Just enough that it was bearable, breathable, and as we lay where we’d fallen, tangled, myself just lightly tipsy and Haytham nearly drunk, I tugged him over until he lay down beside me, both of us on my greatcoat with his cloak over us like a blanket, and we stared up at the sky overhead as the last of the drizzle burned off and the clouds parted.

The view of the stars from where we lay was stunning, and Haytham rested his head atop my breast, his breath quiet in my ear. “Ohkwarikó:wa and Ken’niwahkwaritá:’a,” he said, gesturing to the Big and Little Dippers in turn.

“Which language is that?”

“Kanien’kéha. The last I lay and looked at the stars like this, I was being taught the names for the constellations.” I hadn’t known he spoke Kanien’kéha, and it was relieving that even despite all the things he had told me, there was still a whole world to him I didn’t know.

“Have you told Charles?” I asked, after a time, and I heard the sound he made to confirm in the negative more from the reverberations it made in his chest than the noise it made in my ear.

“You know how his allegiances lay. Charles may love me today, but he is devoted to the Order before he is to any one man, and always will be. For him, the world that we exist in is one that must be shaped and formed and changed, and he has found his avenue in the Templars; he would never understand. Not like you.”

“Aye,” I agreed, because I did understand. Haytham and I were alike in so many ways, this just another of them. We had both been betrayed by those who we cared for most dearly, and I carded my fingers through his hair, damp and falling from its queue. “Then would I be right in guessing that Reginald’s death led to the elevation of the current Grand Master in the Northern Department, who has continued to push for War?” Haytham made an affirmative noise. “And how does Jenny work into this?”

“She is but an interested party. I gave her what training I could when we returned to London, needing to exercise to strengthen my body after my lengthy convalescence, but it is not enough for her to serve the Assassins in any official aspect. Instead, she has become something of an arbiter between the sides here in London, granting ascendancy to neither, and working to ease tensions where possible. She keeps me abreast of events here as she can, trusting my judgment some slight amount more than that of most Templars, and when it became clear to her that my counterpart here was not intending to take matters into his own hands...”

“She wrote to you,” I finished. “And you picked me.” And then I said it, the words which had haunted me since that day in New York. “To kill King George II.”

“Yes,” he said, and it warmed my heart to hear the note of frailty in his voice. “He must be poisoned. If he dies at the party—“ Haytham didn’t need to finish that thought for me to understand his implication, and I nodded. Yes. He had to be poisoned. “I do not have the facility you do with the crafting of such unctions; I would almost certainly jeopardize such a purpose. But should you find yourself unable to do it, I shall not castigate you for it. We will just find another way.”

“No,” I murmured. He sat up above me, and in the light of the moon and stars, casting his face into sharp contrast of light and shadow, his hair loose and falling about his cheekbones, his face rough with stubble, I felt my heart too large for my chest. “I swore an oath. I trust you. More, now, than I did even before. Aye,” I continued, admonishing him as I reached up to touch the scar over his eye, now finally reaching the same shade as the skin around it, “You nearly went too far. Perhaps you did with Braddock; I can’t say for not being there. But you stepped back from that precipice, and I believe you’ll do it again.

“If we must kill him, aye, Sir. I’ll do it.”

“Good man,” Haytham whispered, and leaned forward to kiss me. My fingers settled at the nape of his neck, his skin warm beneath his hair. His hat had fallen aside, totally forgotten, and he sighed into the kiss, kept our faces pressed close together even after it broke.

“How much did that try you?” I asked, and he made a questioning noise. “All that talk of the past.”

“My throat is a bit raw, but the narrative of it has been hardened to me, just as Lisbon has been to you. Why do you ask?”

“If this is the only time we’re ever planning to climb up here, I can think of something _else_ not a wee bit sacrilegious. I’ve had plenty of convent girls, but not a single priest.”

Haytham laughed into my mouth, took my face in his hands, and muttered into my skin, as he nosed apart the kerchief round my neck, “Pater hêmôn ho en toes ouranoes;” he whispered, and I began to laugh as I realized he was giving me the Lord’s Prayer in Greek.

“I’ll never be able to sit through another service again, will I?” I asked him, rhetorically, and he just laughed.

 

 

We did not return to the house that night, opting instead to doze in our perch amongst the stars, and only belatedly climbed down from atop the dome as false dawn began to silver the sky, as to not be caught unable to exit in proper secrecy in daylight. When we got back to the house at Queen Anne’s Square we found Jenny already awake and waiting for us, and she pretended to not notice how mussed we were, still damp from the drizzle that had started up again on our way back from the Cathedral. “Go get properly cleaned up,” she admonished us, opening the newspaper over her tea, “And come back down here. The tailor is on his way at half-nine precisely.”

The following week was a whirlwind. It seemed every hour of every day there was some thing or another that needed doing, as I was fitted for everything from breeches and shoes to a wig, which both Haytham and Jenny were forced to admit did not do me any compliments, settling for powdering my hair as Haytham did. Then there were visits to salons, public events where I was introduced to gentry to practice the skills Haytham and Jenny were forced to truncate in their teaching—forms of address for nobility, how to bow, how to eat with a full set of tableware, how to affect something (almost akin to) appropriate language.

The high points of those rushed days were when we went to visit Doctor Franklin, who welcomed both Haytham and I quite warmly and set to ingratiating himself with Jenny right away, flirting nearly as shamelessly as Gist had, albeit less coarse in his manners and language. Haytham wanted advice on his spectacles, struggling as he was with reading close-up while his distance vision remained superb; Jenny had sent the Doctor some months before a design that Haytham had received as a copy from members of the Habsburg Rite, taken from the journals of Leonardo da Vinci, for a wrist-mounted form of a pistol that had been converted to function like my rifle did, firing via air almost like a blow-dart.

This contraption was for me, and I understood immediately the intention behind it. We tested it out, firing darts and sticking them to the wall, pinning up sheets of paper to Franklin’s visible delight. We stayed for supper, promising to come by again before we left the city, at the very least to pick up a new pair of lenses for Haytham, which were only eventually delivered hand-in-hand with an admonishment to wear them more often, rather than straining his eyes and further degrading his vision for reading.

The party we were to attend was set for the 22nd, and the afternoon before Jenny sent me out to London proper with a list of things to pick up for her, and I returned in time for supper, expecting to find the house ready for the meal.

Instead, Haytham met me at the top of the steps. “Your timing is preordained,” he told me, his hand hovering perhaps two inches off of my elbow. “Come in and change; I was able to get a pair of box tickets to see _Giulio Cesare in Egitto_ tonight. Consider it a send-off; must needs you dress your best, however, and leave off all weapons but your blades.” Haytham swept me indoors, helped me into the clothes I would be wearing to the party the following evening. Then, together—me wincing in my buckle-shoes—we whisked down the stairs to a waiting chaise that bore us hence.

We alighted at the Royal Opera House, and we made our way inside. Haytham doffed his hat immediately, having opted tonight for the black and gold one, which he passed as well as our tickets to an usher, and then gestured for me to follow him. “I’ve not been here in six years,” he admitted as we walked, his hands folded behind his back. Tonight he looked splendid: he wore a shot silk tailcoat that in each shift of the light appeared crimson or a rich brown at turns, atop a black waistcoat cut quite high, against current fashion trends. It never ceased to amaze me that he looked good in nearly anything. “I was here the night before I left for the Colonies.”

“Miko’s death,” I supplied, and he nodded. “Faulkner was in dock here, in London, when it happened.”

“Was it he who chased the _Providence_?” Haytham asked, gently pushing between a cluster of overexcited young women who giggled and tittered at us.

“Aye; in the _Aquila_. You did a right number to her. She barely limped back to the Homestead in one piece, and half of that was being blown by the luck of the winds after her mast was bust. Last I knew, she was still laid up in repairs.” His shoulders straightened, and I did not have to see his face to know it was presently host to a smug grin. “What were they performing?”

“Gay’s _Beggar’s Opera_. A trifle, I will admit, but one that I have found enjoyable upon my numerous viewings. It is a comedy, although _farce_ is more accurate. All very topical and prescient. Someday I can but hope you have an opportunity to see it.”

“If the winds blow right,” I agreed, as we reached our destination: a box, near to the stage, on the left side. Haytham gestured for me to go first, and I stepped in to find a single row of chairs in front of the curtains. I sat down after a moment, looking back as he joined me, tilting his chair sideways immediately so that he faced toward me more than toward the stage with his side toward the entrance to the box, the better to keep an eye on anyone who might approach. “You willing to translate?” I asked, as we watched the crowds below filter in, and Haytham checked his watch, muttering _ten minutes_ under his breath as he tucked it away once more.

“I shall endeavor to do so, but I cannot promise anything bar a general grasp of the history, based as it is on the life of Julius Caesar.” Haytham arched a brow and looked toward me. “A Templar, you know.”

“I know. Brutus and Cassius were Assassins, too. Quit trying to change the subject on me, Sir.” I grinned at him, merciless, catching his avoidance tactic. “What’s this about a poor translation? Haytham Kenway, doesn’t speak a language?”

“My Italian is...imprecise,” he managed, after a moment. “It is supposed to be impolitic to call attention to your better’s faults.” I kept grinning at him. “Nevertheless, combine Spanish, French, and Latin and I certainly can get _about._ You will just have to live with my best guess. Nobody comes for the libretto anyway; the _music_ is the thing to enjoy.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I murmured. “Most of my music is shanties and tavern songs. Can’t say I’ve ever even been to a theatre.”

Haytham hummed, leaning closer to me, his arm nearly atop the back of my seat, hovering nearby enough I could feel its heat. “We shall have to remedy that as best we can, then. There remains yet plenty of time before John and Gist return, even if they make it as fast as possible...I do believe I can _appropriate_ some funds to further your education. Reginald left me quite the bequest in his will, after all. It would only do to waste it in a fashion he would find absolutely repugnant.” As the stage got brighter, Haytham leaned closer, and whispered, “He _hated_ the theatre.”

 

 

The hour was late indeed when we returned to the house in Queen Anne’s Square. The opera had left my ears ringing with the distant strains of music, now lost to the night, and I longed already for the darkness of Haytham’s room, the warmth of our shared bed. Together we entered the house, Haytham unlocking the door with his own key to keep from waking anyone within, climbing the stairs to his bedroom in a comfortable silence.

Haytham lit the tapers by touch while I changed clothes, rubbing the feeling back into my feet, pinched tight as they had been by my new shoes, grimacing. “Bloody sore as hell in the morning,” I muttered under my breath, curling my toes. Buckle shoes looked all well and good, but they were no replacement for a proper pair of riding boots worn-in over fifteen years. “I ought to apologize to Jenny for the injuries I’ll do her feet.”

“She will hardly blame you,” Haytham replied. His voice was low and tired; I glanced up to see him washing his face in the basin at his vanity, staring at himself in the cloudy mirror, apparently debating shaving and then tossing down the rag, having given it up as a loss. “My sister is not a gifted dancer by any stretch of the imagination.”

“That seems hard for me to believe. I’ve met you, Hayth—no way your sister isn’t graceful.”

“’Tis not a lack of grace,” he agreed, “But more a desire to not ever have to touch any man.”

I considered the proposition in light of what I knew of Jenny’s past, and made a quiet noise of assent. “Would I were not,” I said it without thinking, hid it under my breath, and froze when I felt Haytham’s hand upon my shoulder. He tilted my chin up with one gentle finger until I looked him full in the face, and his eyes were unreadable as stormy clouds above a roiling sea.

“If I could, I would take whoever said those words to you and pluck from between their lips their lying tongue,” his voice was scalding with fury as he spoke it, even if his face was placid and his hand steady. “Would you were only that which you are. There is none better suited for it than you.”

I stared back up at him, and wondered, not for the first time, which saint or god or spirit had looked down at me and turned me from the path I’d faced as my future to find Haytham Kenway squarely before me, so I would never have to fall alone.

“Are you ready?”

My heart, in my chest, squeezed tight. I thought about those long-ago days of my youth when I had never been asked; I had been ordered. I had been trained, turned, and set loose. But Haytham—Haytham always asked.

Haytham always asked, and I had never failed him yet.

I could not bring myself to fail him now.


	6. ACT V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It’s done,” I murmured, again and again. I would add no more innocent blood to my debt.

ACT V:

> _now, antony, our hopes are answered: you said the enemy would not come down,  
>  but keep the kills and upper regions; it proves not so: their battles are at hand;  
>  they mean to warn us at phillippi here, answering before we do demand of them._

 

I didn’t remember getting out of the party, or even how we had managed to effect so early a retreat. From the moment that Jenny had pressed a flute of some sort of champagne into my hands and forced me to drink it _politely_ rather than throwing it down the back of my throat like it was something far harder, I had stopped quite knowing where I was, focusing on the low heat of the alcohol rather than the press of my guilt like a creature alive inside me, threatening to rend me in twain from the inside out. Two more drinks had rendered enough lift to my spirits that I had been able to engage with Haytham’s companions, Templars all, as if there was little wrong past my inexperience with my environment, my newness to a status I had never before affected.

Haytham had kept his hand near to me from the moment he had seen my face, noticed I was not all there, and the moment we had been escorted back to the family chaise, he’d set his broad-palmed hand against the back of my neck. I had almost sobbed with how I missed the heat of it pure against my skin: blocked by the stock I had been forced to wear, rather than my usual kerchief, I could feel less of the texture of his gloves, nothing of the true comfort of his body I truly needed.

“It’s done,” I murmured, again and again, to myself and him, as Jenny held my trembling hands all the way back to the house at Queen Anne’s Square, her thumbs brushing over the tendons that stood out even through my doeskin gloves, so tense was I. It was the only place I could look with any surety, for at least I could be certain like that my dart gun would not take any more lives tonight. I would add no more innocent blood to my debt.

Every time I began to think on it too hard, I could see the flames in Lisbon behind my eyelids, and every time I did, I started to shake, and Haytham’s hand tightened, guarding me, guiding me down. _Stay with us_ , it seemed to say. _Stay here_.

If Haytham and Jenny spoke, I did not hear them, lost as I was within whatever secret world populated my mind with shuddering, shimmering thoughts, gallivanting and cartwheeling and always coming home to my hand plunging a knife home into a body that could not lift even a finger in its own defense.

I did not really wake from my living stupor until I was in Haytham’s bedroom. He had stoked the fire and lit the lamp upon the bedside table, but nothing else, and in the low yellow light I found myself standing, unsteadily, in the middle of the room as he helped me undress, my body moving to his motions as he murmured requests into my ear. My shoes and coat were gone, along with my bracers, and he’d roughly scrubbed my hair of powder and pomade, left it damp and loose around my shoulders. Haytham stepped in front of me, his hands coming to undo the buttons of my waistcoat—he was still near to fully dressed himself. He’d only disposed of his shoes and fixed his own hair back to its normal state.

He’d left his own down to dry, even though it was considerably longer than mine and had to be getting into his face. Left to its own devices, strands of his dark hair had escaped over his forehead, slid over his ears, and now hung into his eyes, a cowlick making it stick up just over his right temple, above the scar that Achilles had given him in March, still faintly pink. His lips were pursed and his expression unreadable, sharp even with the vulnerability lent by his hair being loose, and I lifted my hands to his, stopped him with my fingers against the back of his wrist.

His eyes met mine, and immediately, Haytham took my face in his hands. “There you are,” his thumb brushed the scar beneath my eye. “You gave Jenny and I both a terrible fright. Are you—“

“I’ll live.” My voice came out rough and uneven, and I swallowed, trying to soften it past the lump in my throat. “I just...”

“Shay, what you did tonight—the world owes you thanks beyond your knowing. I shudder to think what I have forced you to take upon your shoulders again, the guilt that you bathe in for my fancy, but I want you to know—“

I pressed my hand over his mouth, and found myself shaking hard enough to fall apart as I did it. My knees trembled, and I shivered as violently as if I’d just fallen in the water at St. John’s in January. “Please,” my voice cracked on that one word. I felt tears burning the back of my eyes. “ _Please_ don’t. Hayth, if you tell me—I can’t be _praised_ for this.” I could only remember Liam, his hand warm on my shoulder, burning through my coat, as he told me murdering unarmed old men, _however_ cruel they were, however deeply they had scarred the land, was the right thing to do. That I had given Lawrence Washington mercy with my blade through the base of his throat as he bled out in a rosebush. That I had—

Mutely, I dropped my forehead to sit in the crook of Haytham’s shoulder, my nose digging into his lapels and his collarbone beneath it. The hand I’d bunched into the silk of his waistcoat clenched spasmodically, as I tried to find equilibrium and failed. “Mercy dealt with a sword is hardly mercy at all,” I whispered, and wheezed out a single, wracking sob as Haytham gathered me to him, his strong arms tight around my back, his hand cupping the back of my neck once again as he turned his face to press his nose into my hair, sighed against the shell of my ear.

We stood there for a very long time, until my hand dropped from his mouth to clutch at his shoulder. All the while, he rubbed my back like I was a frightened child, wailing for solace after some terror had roused me from my nighttime torpor. He kissed my temple, and I listened to his heartbeat as I calmed, my heart slowing, my breathing timing to his own. It was to my immense relief that it was not tendered toward me in exasperation or resignation, a forceful show of care for my excited state. He cared for me in troth, and not feeling a burden on him was the only bright spot in the darkness of my mind.

If I had been forced to account for all the reasons by which I loved Haytham Kenway, perhaps top of the list was that he had never, not once, asked me to recount for him some horror that haunted me like a godless spirit that rode upon my shoulders. I had always given them to him of my free will, or not at all, just as he had with his own. He understood me, and I had always wondered why and how he was so truly of my own mind until he had told me of Reginald and Jim’s death.

Now, the truth writ plain between us, I could see how close our own minds twined, the shadows that haunted his own steps same as they did mine. They weren’t the same specters, but the ghosts were of a kind. I had always treated him with respect and care in his needs. He endeavored to do the same for me.

“Smith?” Haytham asked, his voice low. “Or Lisbon?” I nodded, uncoordinated, to both, my face still buried in the cloth over his shoulder, the embroidery and seams of his coat digging into my cheek. I was wrinkling his Knight’s sash, the red satin crumpling beneath my white-knuckled fingers, but he seemed to hardly care, did not mention it to me to let go. “Washington?”

“All,” I croaked, at last. Haytham nodded.

“What do you need?” I sobbed, broken, rubbed raw and open by his patience and care, and he immediately pulled me closer, crushed me to him, let me revel in the reassurance of his presence and his strength. Reminding me, perhaps, that he could take some of this agony from me, exorcise for however short or long I needed the worst of that which haunted me. “Whatever you need, Shay.”

“I can’t think,” I let it be lost in his coat. “I can’t—need to stop thinking. Need to be good for you. Hell, Haytham, give me something you can praise me for that won’t make me want to—“

“Hush, I can. I know.” I swallowed, my throat painfully dry; he could still not bear to hear the thoughts that plagued me, the shades that stretched over the back of my mind. He knew what they were, but never the words to them: after Jim’s death— “Let me get us both out of all this. Can you help?” I nodded again, not trusting myself to speak, and undressed mechanically, handing Haytham my clothes as I lost them. He folded or hung everything as it needed to be, eschewing any manservants and laboring as such himself, acting for me in a capacity nobody had before, preserving my privacy and his own in turn.

He stopped in his shirt, under-breeches, and silk stockings, but helped me until I was wearing nothing at all. Even with the fire I fain shook with cold until he crowded me back into the bed and took me in his arms.

This time, as I lost track of who and where I was to the attentions of his soft mouth and strong arms, of the aspects and lines of my body, it was with joy, and not agony. Haytham pulled me to his lap, let me straddle his hips and work myself up before he grabbed a fistful of my hair at the nape of my neck, jerked my head back until I cried out, my fingers clenching white-knuckled in the cloth of the bedspread beneath him, my nipples hardening almost painfully, my body crying out for his touch.

Against the crux of my legs, I felt him hard and hot within his breeches, and he kissed the upturned arc of my throat with a tenderness that made me shudder.

“Do you want my hand, or something harder?” I shuddered again as his mouth moved lower, his grip on me never shifting or letting up. His kisses remained gentle, almost feather-light, as he reached my collarbones, and then ducked again, to the tops of my breasts, kissed either one just to draw a whimper from me. At first, out of embarrassment, I had been almost silent with him—now, he reveled in any noise he could wring from my throat, found nothing unwanted in them, loved me and all my faults and my body, so unlike his own tastes.

“Harder,” I said, when he let go of my hair enough for me to be able to speak. “Harder, please. As hard as you can.”

Haytham laughed, kissing lower, and I shifted hopefully toward his mouth—and he rewarded me with a single kiss to one nipple, not enough to truly be _sensation_ but enough to promise its presence. “You make me long for a paddle, but I think it best we avoid waking the entire house. It’s too late for that. Do you want to be atop my lap?” I nodded again, and he squeezed my hip. “Then get off. I have something in mind.”

Rolling away from him to sit half-curled on the bedspread, Haytham stood, crossed the room to his wardrobe, and opened the doors. I watched him as he returned a moment later after shutting it, holding his bandolier in hand, and I bit on my lower lip, hard, as I felt the heart of me throb and clench in apprehension. He stopped just long enough to pick up one of my stockings, and held it out to me, balled as it was.

I took his implication without his needing to tell me, and crammed it into my own mouth without complaint, letting it settle behind my teeth, press my tongue flat. I breathed through my nose slowly and carefully to avoid gagging on it as Haytham sat down once more, his breeches front straining over his erection as he settled, his feet pressed firmly to the floor for leverage, and lifted his arms.

I crawled over his lap, my ass toward his right hand, and spread my legs as he brushed them apart, dug my knees and curling toes into the mattress. The rattle of his belt buckle, the shift of the straining leather, made the fine hairs on the back of my neck and my arms stand on end, and I bit back a noise of apprehension as he set the belt against the curve of my ass, let me feel it there, built the suspense. Let me relax. “Thirty-three years for George the second,” he mused, his other hand stroking down the arch of my back before settling against the dip just above my hips, the ruffle and lace of his cuff brushing my skin almost light enough to tickle. “So thirty-three strikes for you, I think.” I crossed my hands behind myself, as he had asked me to on previous such occasions, and he let me hold them there rather than pinning them. “If you need me to stop, lower your hands.”

That was his last warning, and the first strike from his swordbelt striped along the top of my ass, letting me know how hard he would be giving it to me. I jumped, surprised at its sudden power, and pressed my face into the bedspread, gasping in pain as the sting settled fully into my flesh, radiating out from where his belt had landed. I evened my breath back out, relaxed against him, as he waited. I nodded, to let him know it was good, it was strong enough, it was going to be enough.

In the morning, I would probably nigh on be unable to sit, but I would at least feel like an actual human person and not a miserable pile of agonies and secrets.

Haytham counted for me, as I was most effectively gagged. His next strike landed higher on my ass, the stripe crossing his previous one only slightly, and soon I lost track of which strike landed where, for he worked up to nearly his full strength, not going easy on me, knowing I could take it. I was being good for him, being the best for him, because I could handle it and he knew it, and I cried my unfettered tears through the pain as I curled my hands into claws, gripped my own fingers, sobbed my adulation as he took my penance from me in each new inch of skin he rendered raw and throbbing by his strikes.

The world simplified, coalesced, narrowed to a point, where it was free of my body. There was nothing but my mind and my skin and his hand, keeping me still upon his lap as each strike threatened to rock me or move me forward, my body jumping with every impact and the jarring, ringing pain that it left that percolated my entire being, my mind shattering as it broke me apart into the baser forms of myself, the individual facets of what made me, greyed and then whited into oblivion and bliss and the crack of the leather and the burn of my skin and the _agony_ that left me dripping, throbbing, painfully hard and needy and already so close I could perhaps have come apart on this alone if he had told me I could.

“Shay,” Haytham’s voice brought me back, reeled me in like a fish hooked to a line, his fingers stroking my hair behind my ears. He had been speaking to me for some time, but I had heard none of it; I could hear the pleading tone in his voice, and against my hip I could feel his frantic hardness, a brand that spoke more than his words could to how greatly he needed me, found pleasure that could be taken of me, in me, from me.

Doing well for him. His praises for me. “Shay, _mi alma_ , you’re doing so well. Can you hear me?” I nodded, jerkily; found my face covered in my own tears, my nose clogged with snot, my lips and chin soaking wet from where I had drooled around the makeshift gag of my stocking. My ass and thighs, now that I was more within myself, burned like I could not believe, so painful every brush of his palm gently ghosting over them made me whimper and my breath hitch and my legs twitch and tremble, my toes curl in agony. Oh, it hurt. “How is it?” I moaned, ducking my head, baring my neck for him, and he made an appreciative noise.

He had set the belt aside, and his long, hot fingers were ghosting between my cheeks—he had striped there, too, against the buzzing, hypersensitive nerves of my rear entrance, and I could tell how terribly sore I would be in the morning. He kept brushing downward, dragging between my folds, dipping into my slick just enough to make me shudder all over. “That was thirty,” Haytham told me, his voice low, as he massaged at the corded, tight muscles of my wrists, my entire body painfully on-edge with how much I _needed_. “You did beautifully, Shay. Never once needed me to stop. You took it so well. Better than I could ever have asked.

“Do you want your last three on your cunt, dear boy?”

I shut my eyes as my body imagined the implied sensation. The very thought—as hard as he had been striking me, it would hurt to walk for days, my lips would swell, my clit would throb and shudder near to breaking beneath his touch. It would be nothing like his touch now, half-teasing me with my need already so close to completion as I dripped over his fingers and his lap. Haytham let me think about it, until I nodded, whimpering something that perhaps was _yes_ , my grasp of words rendered nonexistent, stolen and torn from me by his exertions, so precisely calculated to take from me my sense and my coherence.

Haytham helped me roll over, to sit more properly upon the bed and not on his lap, and I took my ankles without his coaxing, planted my heels on the bed, curled my toes, and I looked up at the ceiling above my head, bit my lower lip. His hands spread my thighs wider, as wide as was comfortable, and he pressed a hot kiss to the inside of one knee, ground his thumb gently into my clit. “There you go,” he murmured, his voice hot and thick with affection and arousal in equal measure. “Three more. You can do it, I know you can.”

He pulled away, I shut my eyes, and took a deep breath.

The first strike was weaker than the ones he had striped my ass with, across the fullness of my sex, and I fervently thanked his foresight for gagging me as I yelped, arching almost entirely off of my back, my entire body jerking and surging upward, the force of it hard enough to ricochet an almost unimaginable sensation through me.

I had been electrocuted once, when helping Franklin with the Precursor Box, and this did something similar to me, my entire body and mind on an edge so razor-sharp and fine that had my eyes been open I would have been temporarily blinded.

The next strike was harder, even, and I curled my entire body into itself, rocking helplessly back and forth as I screamed in the most exquisite of agonies, the pleasure beyond any comprehension I had ever known I could possess, the pain so total that it rendered me deaf, silence and pressure ringing in my ears as I cried and cried, sobbing, rocking back and forth and shaking all over with the adrenaline of it as my body screamed, saying how much, _too_ much, even as the core of me throbbed and roiled with need for it, as I soaked with slick, clenching helplessly.

Haytham rolled me back upright, spread my legs again, anchored my heels to the bed. His fingers, so kind and gentle against me, were like sandpaper over my swollen and agonized skin as he brushed them into me, dipped two within me and ground his fingertips into my aching clit. I clenched against him, jolting up off of the bed and yelling again at the gentleness of the touch, how terribly, terribly close I was to climax, how patient I had been, when all I needed was just the allowance, to come apart for him as I so dearly wanted to.

It was only once I was still that he landed the third strike, and the strength and pain of it was such that there was nothing at all but that one white-hot moment of agony. The world went totally silent; my heartbeat roaring so loudly in my ears it was incomprehensible I had never not heard it. My vision, even behind my closed eyelids, was nonexistent. I hyperventilated in torment and euphoria both, curled into a trembling ball, rocking back and forth and sobbing, crying ugly, hot tears into the bed even as I soaked my own thighs with my wet, my clit so hard and needy from its punishment it felt like it was going to break, to crack and tremble beneath the force of my arousal, so overwhelming it was like drowning.

The moment I felt Haytham’s hands on me I surged towards his heat and moaned again, his fingers probing my mouth, forcing my jaw to unlock as he pulled the stocking free, bent over me, his body nothing but hot, naked skin against my own as he kissed me, desperately hard, his touch scalding. I opened my mouth beneath him, let him drink from my lips and tongue, held white-knuckled to his shoulders as I heard nothing but my heartbeat and his wordless, praising whispers, as he coaxed me into opening again, unrolling like a flower toward the sun to his touch, and he cupped my cheeks, begged me, his words finally reaching me:

“What do you need, my darling, my dear one, Shay, what can I give you—“

“Your cock,” my voice sounded like someone else, high and breathy and _shattered_ , caught and crumbling at the back of my throat. He jerked, twitched in arousal, kissed me again desperately, and I laughed almost hysterically in my utterly consuming regard for him, my abundant affection that suffused me when he knew I did not mean for him to fuck me, that he instead parted my thighs once again, his fingers against the lips of my cunt making me jerk and lurch, the sensitive skin bruised from his loving abuse. His thumb brushed my clit again and I bit the top of his shoulder, dug my teeth into the sweat-salty skin there to muffle my wail of ecstatic agony at the sensation, magnified a thousand times to electrify every inch of my skin.

He held my lips open, pressed the steely heat of the burnished line of his hardness between them, over my throbbing core and my white-hot clit, and pressed my knees up toward my chest, found a hot and too-rough pace, fucking himself, dragging his length over me fast and hard, my slick making it loud and messy and furious.

His mouth found my own, and I clutched to him, helpless in my need, pulled him to me by a hand tangled and knotted in his hair and the other at the nape of his neck. He murmured breathless accolades into my lips and tongue, and pressed his forehead against my own—and I did not need to see him to know the look of agony and exultation on his face as he kissed the upturned hopeful gasp of my own mouth.

“Come, Shay, come for me, come on, with me, my dear boy, together, you—I could never—I’m so proud of you—I love you—“

My completion came over me, sudden and total, and I dug my nails into Haytham’s neck hard enough I felt them break the skin as I seized, jerking violently against him even as he spilled himself over my sex and into me in turn, as I soaked him and he soaked me, our issue lost in one another and he did not stop, did not slow, still fucking too much sensation into me, over me, forcing me to feel the fullness of his devotion to me until it became too much again and I broke, crying in a way I had not in five years, fracturing, splintering, crumbling apart, sundered completely from the tether of the fundament and held only in the safety of the harbor of his arms.

 

 

Eventually, I was forced to come back to myself, in fits and starts that edged very nearly to a reluctance to accept the bounds of my physical form again. When I did, time had run together enough that I could not guess at the hour, nor to how I had come to be where I was, the previous moments between my bouts of conscious lost to me.

My face was pressed into the side of Haytham’s neck, my head pillowed on the crook of his shoulder. Beneath me, I could feel his heartbeat in the press of his jugular to my forehead, my lashes fluttering into the tender shadows beneath the powerful tendons of his throat. He had his right arm wrapped around me, his hand splayed over my hipbone, and he had tucked his face back against me, his prominent nose pressed to my temple. I could feel his lips, next to my cheekbone, as he moved them occasionally, the cold line of the metal of the arm of his spectacles across my forehead.

Our legs were tangled together, his manhood soft against me and my own sex terrifically tender where his thigh was tucked between my own. My right hand had landed atop the scar above his left hip, and I traced it, mindless. It was the first time I had felt it since he had told me the truth about how he had gotten it, and I could see, now, why it was so tender. Why it would never heal.

His body and mind were united together in hanging onto it, as a reminder.

“Welcome back,” Haytham murmured, the words exhaled in a breath that puffed against my closed eyelids. I grunted, but otherwise neither moved nor spoke, continuing to trace his scar and listen to his even heartbeat. He needed to shave—his stubble was rough against my skin. He had to have cleaned us both, for neither of us were sticky with sweat, and I had nothing soaking my thighs. After a long moment, I reluctantly pulled my hand from beneath the blankets to touch the hand he had holding up the book, made a questioning noise, and immediately put my arm back under the blanket, my palm once again over his scar.

I started to massage the torn and aching muscles over it, and Haytham made an appreciative noise low in his chest that vibrated back into me from how close and tangled we were. “ _Candide, ou l’Optimisme._ I’m not certain you would find anything worthwhile in it.” Left to his own devices for longer than ten minutes, Haytham would start reading—he read more than anyone I had ever met. It was infecting me, too. Whenever I let slip that I had yet to read some text he thought was missing from my haphazard, naval-oriented education, he would just hand me the missing book. “I had expected to get my hands on it months ago, but being at sea for the better part of the past year has rather curtailed my literary sensibilities when it comes to recent publications. Jenny got me a copy.”

Waiting here with me, the both of us tender and raw with everything that had passed in the last two weeks, of course he had settled down with a book. And of course it had been one he’d been waiting for.

“Read to me,” I mumbled into the skin of his shoulder, not opening my mouth properly. He made a questioning noise, and then turned a page.

“Shay, it’s in French.” I lifted my shoulder in a minute shrug. He inhaled, his chest raising beneath my weight, and sighed, shaking his head. I just wanted to hear his voice, lower than usual with exhaustion—he had been burning his candle at both ends, as always—and our earlier exertions, plus the amount he had spoken at the party. It was rough and full in his throat, and his chest vibrated beneath my ear every time he spoke. “Oh, very well.”

I smiled, and he clearly felt it, for he pinched my hip gently, avoiding the bruising that striped much of the nearby skin.

“Let’s see...” Haytham murmured, shifting against me slightly so I could curl closer to him. He relaxed minutely against me every time I dug my fingertips deeper into his scar tissue, trying to work out the knots in his muscles a little at a time. In return, he shifted his hand up from my hip to scratch gently at the entry scar from where Chevalier had shot me years before, on the top of my back, and I made a pleased noise, for it always itched. “‘Deux hommes habillés de bleu le remarquèrent: Camarade, dit l'un, voilà un jeune homme très bien fait, et qui a la taille requise; ils s'avancèrent vers Candide et le prièrent à dîner très civilement.’”

His accent was quite distinct in French; I could tell he’d been taught by Englishmen. But even still, whatever he said was beautiful, his voice rolling like low thunder in his chest beneath my ear. As he continued to read, I just listened, let myself get lost in his words, pressed into my skin as they were. It was almost overwhelming, just how willing Haytham was to indulge me, care for me, _love_ me.

Even now, even after everything the Rite had done to make me a part of their family and their home, it still felt strange. So much of my life had been painfully lonely with only some bright pinpricks, had made me feel an outsider—but with George, and then Christopher, and now Haytham, I was _home_. They loved me, God knew why, and all that baggage too.

I shut my eyes tighter and leaned more into Haytham, burying my face in the top of his chest, smiling into his hair and nuzzling him rather than let my affection bind my heart too much. “Here,” Haytham said, his fingers tangling into the fine hairs at the base of my neck, scratching lazily as he read. “You would like this bit. Let’s see…” He mumbled to himself for a moment, reading and translating extemporaneously, and once again I was stunned by how damn _smart_ the man was.

Haytham Kenway, smartest man I’d ever met, and most foolish in turn, aye. Apparently the two went hand in hand. At least when it came to him. He continued: “‘Candide cried out, ‘Oh, Master Pangloss! Here is an end of the matter, for such horrid doings never entered thy imagination. I find myself obliged to finally after all this renounce my optimism.’ Said Catacombo, ‘What is optimism?’ Candide replied, ‘Alas! Optimism is the foolishness of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.’”

I snorted with laughter, felt him smile. “What is that?” I mumbled, turning my face up so that he could hear me better. “The book.”

“It’s a comedy, of some sorts. It’s extremely salacious—anti-religion, anti-government, anti-optimism.” Haytham paused, and I felt him still. “I heard of it being written last year and I was curious to get my hands on it due to its subject matter, but it was banned immediately upon publication and getting a copy out of the country was...anyway,” he cleared his throat, continued. “It gained my attention because the author was inspired by Lisbon.”

I opened my eyes.

“No, no. Shay, don’t.” Haytham immediately pulled me back to him, soothing me with his fingers buried in my hair, kissing the bridge of my nose. “Not like that. He was as horrified by it as you were. The book is all about how a benevolent God, full of optimism and love for humanity, could never allow such a disaster, and that assuming otherwise means admitting religion is fundamentally flawed. There are parts of the book that remind me a great deal of the way that you think.” I curled more into him, and felt him shift, setting the book aside to take me fully in his arms, kiss my temple.

I didn’t cry again, but I felt wrung out.

“Shay?” Haytham whispered, his fingers trailing down my back, rubbing over my hipbone again even as I clutched at his side, my thumb dug into his scar. “I...my apologies. I shouldn’t have brought it up, known it was too much—“

“No,” I sighed against his collarbone. I pushed him away, gently, and sat up at last, stretching, digging the heels of my palms into my eyes as I yawned, pushed my hair back from my face. At length, I turned to look back at Haytham where he was sprawled over his pillows, his arm still held out for me to return to his embrace. For a moment, I found myself utterly abandoned by all sense and sensibility, startled by his vulnerability. Haytham Kenway was a man who placed walls between himself and everyone; he held every person at arm’s length, even Charles and I. He kept his heart in a steel trap of a cage, iced over, and had by his own admission become even more jealous with it since Jim Holden’s death.

He was terrified of being hurt again, and I could not blame him. He had been hurt so much, for so long, by so many people, for so many reasons, and that he was still able to open himself to me, like this—

I set my hand atop his cheek, and he turned his face into my touch, kissed my palm, cocked one eyebrow at me, questioning. His hair was down, and I touched a few grey strands at his part, combed them back out of his face, trailed my fingers lower to the strong line of his brow and his spectacles still upon his face. He let me take them off him, lifted his head, as I set them aside atop his book, rather than let them get smudged.

Haytham caught my wrist, pulled my palm over to kiss it again, and tugged me, unresisting, back down to recline in the cocoon of his arms, my head pillowed on his powerful bicep and his fingers curled against the side of my chest. We stared at one another in companionable silence, our noses brushing, until I shut my eyes, sighed, set my hand atop his scar again to reassure myself once more of his presence, live and vital.

“Hayth?”

“Mmm?”

“Do you ever wish you could just...undo things? Find a way back to yourself in the past and just...stop something?”

“Lisbon?”

“What else?” Haytham kissed the corner of my mouth, and this time pillowed his head on my shoulder, shifting closer so I could work on the exit wound from his scar. His other hand was on the base of my stomach, and he brushed the hair below my navel back and forth, letting it spring and curl against his palm as he thought.

“Loathe as I am to admit it, I once spent a frustrating amount of my time lost in such thoughts. In the weeks after Jim died, when I was recuperating in this bed and so utterly lost in my grief, it was indeed all I could think of. Go back, trade myself for him. Trade Jenny for him. Or, further, to have never become intimate with him and thus spared him all his suffering in whole; or to never have become a Templar at all. If I had remained an Assassin and followed my father’s path...it nearly destroyed me,” he admitted, his whisper so soft I had to strain to hear it. “Jenny told me later that at the time she despaired for my life. She thought I might follow him. It would be deceit to insist otherwise.”

“How do you stop,” I begged him, holding to his hand atop my stomach with my own, our fingers tangled just as our legs and hair were. “I can’t stop thinking about the night I killed Washington. Afterward, Liam congratulated me, you know. Took me down to my cabin and—“ My throat closed. “Kept praising me, telling me what a perfect kill it had been, the blow we had struck for the Brotherhood. But he never— _you_ never saw him. He was a dying man, Hayth. He could barely stand, couldn’t have drawn on me, his hands shaking too hard to fire a pistol. And I walked up to him at his party and rammed my blade through his throat.”

Haytham pulled me closer to him again, his very presence reassuring.

“I’ve met his brother,” Haytham said, at last, when I was calmer. “Several times since. George and I are neighbors, in fact—he at Mount Vernon and I at Eagle Point. I never met Lawrence Washington, although he and I corresponded for some many years, both of us Reginald’s protégés, and he always spoke highly of his brother, so I brought it up once, inuring as to the content of some rumor I had heard, claiming I was curious as an old school friend.” Haytham rubbed the base of my stomach again, trying to soothe me.

“Lawrence was dying of consumption, Shay. He and George went to Barbados to try and improve his health in the climate. Haiti only made it even worse; the dust he breathed in during the earthquake...”

“And?” I prompted him, to get him back to the point before he rambled.

“George told me what happened, albeit his own version. How someone had snuck into the party that night, murdered his brother. Lawrence lived past you stabbing him, you know—he died early that morning, his wife and brother at his bedside. George told me how relieved he was that his brother had been given such an easy end, so comparatively fast. How highly Lawrence, dying, had spoken of the man that had done it, for making it quick and clean. Shay, if you hadn’t killed him, he would have struggled on for months, if not years, his body sickening until he could not even speak or eat.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “Liam was wrong to claim murder, of _anyone_ , as a blessing or a gift to the Order or to the world. You were right to insist upon letting Achilles live. Who are we, if we cannot show mercy?

“But mercy can sometimes come at the point of a knife.” Haytham hesitated, then, and added, softer, “Or in a noose.”

“I wish I’d died in Lisbon,” I whispered it to him and even upon my own tongue it tasted of poison, and Haytham took my face in his hand, kissed me firmly, pressed our foreheads together. I squeezed his scar, to remind him I was still there. “Don’t think I’m about to go somewhere you haven’t sent me, Sir. But—“ God, my dreams for years had been made up of nightmares, yes, but sometimes, I would be lucky and a roof would cave in, or a fire would catch, or—

“If you had, then I surely would be lost,” Haytham replied, and I felt the world drop out from under my feet.

I shut my eyes.

“Hayth,”

“No, no. Shay—“ His breath shook as he inhaled. “After Jim died, I hated everything we were, everything we stood for. Reginald stole my life from me, stole Jenny’s life from her, and I would toss and turn at night, imagining if I had just died in the attack on Queen Anne’s Square all those years ago, they would have perhaps been safer. Or perhaps not. Or—I don’t know, Shay.” I couldn’t, for all my searching my mind, think of a time he had ever been so informal, so open with me. He swallowed. “And then I met you.” His voice cracked. “The Rite is all I’ve ever known. All I ever will know. But you, Shay, you saw with unclouded eyes, saw with mercy I could not find again. You joined us to make the world better, and I know you would leave in a heartbeat if you had to. Your ideals are greater than our oaths, and I respect that more than words could convey.

“I could never again wish to undo a past action, when I know now that all those things, great and terrible as they were, helped to bring you to my side and place within your hands the skills to shape the world. I once, in error, wrote in my journal that I should never meet another that would be Jim’s equal. Charles is too untrusting; he treats only those he believes are deserving of his respect as his companions and all others with scorn. Jim was not like that.”

We both remained there, very quiet.

“ _You_ are not like that,” Haytham whispered. “I believe my eyes were shut the day Jim died, and I turned away from myself and my actions. It was easier to simply—kill, I suppose, a part of myself. I am skilled in death, after all. It is my greatest talent, and one that has been trained and honed to perfection. But when you stayed my hand above Achilles, reminded me of that which we stand for, they opened again. I shudder to think of what path my future should have walked were it not for you reminding me of my duty. So I cannot wish to undo the past. Not yours; not my own.

“But I can wish that you would offer unto your own conscience half the forgiveness that you offer to others. You did not destroy Lisbon, Shay, no more than God did.”

“Then why does it _hurt_ so damn much, Haytham?” I dug my hands into my eyes. “Why does it feel like every fucking day I live on, every life I take when they can’t have as high a chance of running me through, feel like another on that tally? Will I _ever_ stop wishing I could trade my one worthless life for some balance? I only wish God and Heaven were real and not the hopeless dream of deluded saints so that I could be judged and found wanting!” I spat the last with invective that burned my lips, and against the closed lids of my eyes, Haytham’s shadow blocked out the flicker of the candle flame as he leaned over me.

“Shay,” he whispered, and I opened my eyes without him asking, found him staring at me, his sable hair, shot with the finest filigrees of silver falling over his shoulders, and the softness that gentled his sharp visage tendered such affection in me in turn—

Haytham smiled and shook his head, brushed my hair from my face.

“Because,” he said, and it was in this tone that struck me to the core, honest in a way that nothing in my life had ever seemed quite so true, “You refuse to allow your heart to harden, to allow age and experience to shut your eyes to injustice. In the darkest night, I find myself a man turned heartless and cold, but you fain glow. And it is for that precise reason that I know there is none in the Rite your equal, for should I betray that code which you hold dearer than even your own loves, you would rather take my blood upon your hands than allow me to wallow in that ignominy.”

Haytham kissed me.

“And,” he added, into the hollow below my lip, “It is why I can trust you to do that which none other would. For you will always see and treat the truth, even when it unto you is as cruel and deadly as a poison, and that honesty is worth more than any weight that could be paid in gold.”

 

 

After he snuffed the light, we lay in the dark, Haytham curled protectively around my back, his face pressed into the nape of my neck. I lay awake for a long time, even as Morpheus’ claws threatened upon my conscious, and came near enough to slumber that I felt Haytham shift as if he thought I was already asleep. “Hence, Shay, wilt thou lift up Olympus.”

“Julius Caesar,” I murmured into the pillow. “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?”

“Aye,” he replied, his breath a hot ghost over my ear. “And you be the hands which speak for me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> huge shoutout goes to @vorpalplatypus, @rethira, @chuchisushi, @patrexes and @jacktannerinhell for helping this section of this fic come to fruition! as i've mentioned before this is an interlude from the entire work, but this is the section that is Done. if you've enjoyed this, i hope you may (someday!) enjoy the entire work. if i ever finish it.
> 
> until then, thank you for reading!
> 
> you can find me online at noahfronsenburg.carrd.co

**Author's Note:**

> you can buy a jon at wherever books are sold or order one online at noahfronsenburg.carrd.co


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